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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Nano-dinosaurs: why King Kong's dinosaurs were the wrong size



One additional question about Skull Island dinosaurs is why they did not suffer the size reduction typical of originally large animals when they colonize small islands, where food and other resources are scarce, as asked by Silverberg (in Haber, 2005). 

Does this biological rule apply to dinosaurs? It does, and even though proof was ignored by the paleontological community it  was actually found long ago by the tragic Baron Franz Nopcsa in Hateg, a place where dinosaurs could weigh only an eighth of their mainland relatives weight. 

Baron Franz Nopcs, circa 1913. Source: wikipedia.org

To be absent from early twentieth century charts, Skull Island should have been much smaller than Hateg with its 78 000 km2 (see Benton et al. 2010) and large dinosaurs there would have needed to be much smaller.
Even if we imagine that the island in the 1933 film appears tiny because it is not to scale, viable populations of animals as large as dinosaurs require far larger landmasses: in brief, science does not support the gigantic fauna of Skull Island (or in A. Conan Doyle’s Lost World plateau that inspired it).


Source: https://burrunjor.com/page/7/

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