This article by Dr. Velikovsky appeared in the KRONOS Journal in about 1978. R.Solàrion.

It is not known what was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Did they exterminate one another? Some were carnivorous; the tyrannosaur, with sharp curved claws, sharpened teeth, little forefeet and narrow pelvis, or the allosaur, with bones hollow like those of birds. They fought with the herb-eating Brontosaurus and Diplodocus, attacking with claws and sharp teeth. Some of their skeletons were found in a position that suggests a battle. In the hall of the Dinosauria of the Jurassic period, in the American Museum of Natural History, the final scene of such a battle is reconstructed, showing a carnivorous dinosaur -- Allosaurus -- tearing the carcass of the fallen brontosaur.

What was the weapon of Diplodocus and Brontosaurus? These animals seventy and eighty feet long had no horns, no claws, and no teeth suited for offense of defense. "They were apparently unarmed and weaponless, unless the terminal ten feet of the tail, which was sometimes slender like a whiplash, might be interpreted as a weapon." [R.S. Lull, "Dinosaurs", Encyclopedia Americana.]

It is sometimes supposed that the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, carnivorous and herbivorous alike, might have been in their increased bulk. It is not even clear how the brontosaurs could bear their many tons' weight of body on straight legs. "The increased bulk necessitated their forsaking the strictly terrestrial habitation and becoming partly if not wholly water-borne." "These [Sauropoda] creatures waded, as their heavily ballasted limbs imply, or swam ... but show no distinctively natatory adaptation." [Lull]

For this reason the large brontosaurs and diplodocs are thought to be related to the class of amphibia, or reptiles, living party in water and partly on the land. The skeletons have no signs of adaptation to life in water, but their great weight on land demands this explanation about the amphibious behavior of these animals; in water their bodies would be less heavy. However, Brontosaurus was not an amphibian, but a land animal.

It is conjectured that the brontosaurs grew too heavy to walk on land; but why did they grow so heavy, if the law of evolution is a principle of adaptation to existing conditions? "The cause of extinction is by no means clear." [Lull]

The extinction was not gradual. "The most dramatic and in many respects the most puzzling event in the history of life on the earth ... is the change from the Mesozoic, Age of Reptiles, to the Tertiary, Age of Mammals. It is as if the curtain were rung down suddenly on a stage where all the leading roles were taken by reptiles, especially dinosaurs, in great numbers and bewildering variety, and rose again immediately to reveal the same setting but an entirely new cast, a cast in which the dinosaurs do not appear at all, other reptiles are mere supermumeraries, and the leading parts are all played by mammals of sorts barely hinted at in the preceding acts. [G.G. Simpson, quoted by Shuchert and Dunbar, Outlines of Historical Geology (N.Y., 1941), p. 230]

But a hint is given in the fact that the so-called Laramide revolution, accompanied by a folding of the Earth's crust and the uplifting of mountains, marks the end of the Mesozoic era, or the era of the dinosaurs. It is characteristic: The Mesozoic age terminated in a revolution that uplifted continents and dropped them in other places; and "the period of the extinction of the dinosaurs was coincident with the world-wide Laramide revolution."

[See E.H. Colbert, Wandering Lands and Animals (N.Y., 1973), p. 207 -- "Perhaps the extensive extinctions at the end of Cretaceus time are to be correlated in some way with the beginning of worldwide mountain uplifts, which eventually were to result in the modern great mountain systems -- the Himalayas and the Alps, the Andes and the Rocky Mountains. This is known as the 'Laramide revolution' in earth history. However that may be, the empirical evidence shows that with the advent of Cenozoic history the mammals inherited the earth."]

It should be very simple to imagine that the same catastrophe killed the dinosaurs. Cataclysms are not barred from Geology but they are regarded as slow processes; as a factor in biology, real cataclysms and revolutions have been disqualified since the theory of Darwin about slow adaptations and evolutions became the standard view. Therefore the Laramide revolution folded the Earth's crust and uplifted mountains, but did not affect the life of the dinosaurs, and the cause of their extinction is still being sought.

The beginning of the antediluvian world of beasts may well have been hundreds of thousands, or millions of years ago. This is not being discussed here. But the end of the dinosaurs came well in the age of man, even in the historical part of this age.

Regarding the problem of extinction, Lull notes that "individual species [of dinosaur] are reported from rocks as high as the Lance [formation]. It is hardly conceivable that a few stragglers should survive, even in the more remote portions of the globe, for millions of years after the general extinction of the group, yet this is precisely what our records seem to show, unless there has been a misinterpretation of an extremely local remnant of older strata, as in the Ojo Alamo described by Gilmore, or the lack of recognition of true age, possibly of the lower members of an apparently continuous formation, as in Patagonia."

[Lull, Ibid., p. 275. "Gilmore has just described a form, which he calls Alamosaurus, from the Ojo Alamo beds of New Mexico, an undoubted sauropod, but in inexplicable association with Lance forms, long after the general extinction of the race. He compares measurements with those of Brontosaurus; the scapula of Alamosaurus was 65 inches long to 45 inches for that of Brontosaurus; the ischia, on the other hand, were nearly equal, showing again a brachiosaur-like beast." -- Lull, Organic Adaptation, op.cit., p. 276.]

The revolution which marks the finale of the Cretaceus period was caused by one of the interplanetary contacts. Only a few specimens of the Dinosauria survived the Deluge; single individuals survived one or more of the later cataclysms.

In the great catastrophes, the large terrestrial animals had less chance to survive than the small ones; they could hardly find caves large enough to conceal them; if they found large caves, they thronged into them, and suffocated there or were crushed by the collapse of the caves. Many skeletons of dinosaurs are found in such large caves. Small animals could enter clefts of the rocks, or holes in the ground, and though they also were destroyed by myriads, relatively more of them could survive.

In the conditions that followed the catastrophe, the very few large dinosaurs which were left alive, were condemned to extinction as the result of violent alterations in practically all geophysical conditions; changes in magnetic fields, in temperature, in the composition of the atmosphere, in the length of the day and of the year, along with the change in the seasons, profoundly affected organic life.

Especially the increased weight of everything on the Earth, caused the bodies of the few remaining brontosaurs to become heavier than they could bear. Wading in water, though diminishing the load which ballasts the legs, is no real adaptation: the feet are heavily dragged and sink in the mud below the shallow water. Leaving the water, the animals must have felt the great weight of their bodies and the arresting effect of the mud.

If these animals were mammals, as I suppose, the period of gravidity, because of the additional weight, must have been most disastrous for the female.

Only the monstrous sea-mammals of that age escaped total destruction, and their descendants live until today; these are the whales. They reach over one-hundred feet in length, and in weight they surpass the largest brontosaurs.

It is remarkable that travellers of the second and possibly the first millennium before the present era, brought home these stories:

The ruler over the sea animals is Leviathan. His fins radiate brilliant light, its smell is foul. Leviathan spouts out water. This description, one may guess, is of a whale.

Ziz is the ruler over the birds; it is monstrous in size; its wings are so huge that unfurled they darken the Sun. "Great bird Ziz slaps his wings and utters his cry, so that the birds of prey, the eagles and the vultures, blench." [L. Ginzburg, Legends of the Jews, I (Philadelphia, 1942), p. 28.] The span of the wings of the pterosaurs ranged from 27 feet upwards to an incredible 69 feet, whereas the span of the wings of the large eagles is less than 10 feet.

[COMMENT: This "Ziz Bird" or "Zu Bird" is connected with the arrival sequence of Planet X Nibiru. RS]

Behemot (not to be confused with the animal that bears this name at present) is the most notable representative of the mammal kind. Behemot matches Leviathan in strength. It had to be prevented from multiplying and increasing, "else the world could not have continued to exist". It is deprived of the desire to propagate its kind.

As the above-mentioned travellers could not have visited the American Museum of Natural History on their voyages, nor any other museum of paleontology, nor could they have read modern books on dinosaurs and all their classes, it is puzzling to read their description of the monstrous animals and of their behavior, and also of the weapon used by the largest land animal.

In mortal combat between the gigantic beasts, Leviathan kills by a blow of its fins, and Behemot kills by a lash of its tail. The modern paleontologists wondered at the largest land animal's lack of weapons for attack or defense, which would have made it easy prey for every attacker, and supposed that the animal used its tail as its weapon.

Equally interesting is the description of the gigantic female Reëm when heavy with young. "Leviathan, Ziz, and Behemot are not the only monsters; there are many others, and marvellous ones, like Reëm, a giant animal, of which only one couple, make and female, is in existence ... .The act of copulation occurs but once in seventy years between them ... The act of copulation results in the death of the male. He is bitten by the female and dies of the bite. The female becomes pregnant and remains in this state for no less than twelve years. At the end of this long period she gives birth to twins, a male and a female. The year preceding her delivery she is not able to move ... .For a whole year the animal can but roll from side to side, until finally her belly bursts, and the twins issue forth. Their appearance is thus the signal for the death of the mother reëm." [Ginzburg, Ibid., pp. 28-31.]

The problem of the statics of the dinosaurs, with their pillar-like legs, vexed modern scholars. The larger species are classified as amphibians, though no adaptation for life in water is found in their fossilized remains; they are classified so because, by wading in water, they would have a lesser load of body to carry. That this does not solve the question is shown above. The animals were apparently not adapted to the life conditions and did not survive.

To be more exact, the animals adapted themselves to conditions, but the Earth changed these conditions completely, and more than once. The variations of the force of gravitation became, more than anything else, fatal to the large dinosaurs.