The dinosaurs have been a source of wonder and fascination since they were first discovered. A large part of this fascination is their gigantic size, for they were the largest land animals to ever live, with even the smaller dinosaurs dwarfing the largest land animals of today. Although the gigantic size of the dinosaurs is obvious, the reason has remained a mystery for over a century. Why were the dinosaurs so huge?

As a design engineer, I was particularly interested in calculations which showed that the bones of the larger dinosaurs were too weak to support their own body weight. Here was the essential paradox of the dinosaurs' large size. Their bones should buckle and crack. Yet the fossil bones in museums around the world showed that these giants had thrived in their own world of hundreds of millions of years ago. How can both of these statements be true?

There is one simple, yet astonishing, answer. The size of all life is controlled by gravity. A stronger gravity would tend to reduce the size of life whilst a weaker gravity would allow life to become larger. Dinosaurs may have become so huge because the earth's surface gravity was weaker than present.

The explanation is beautifully simple in its clarification of the dinosaurs' gigantic size. Using the concept of an increasing gravity allows a fascinating new world in which the gigantic animals of the past were forced to develop smaller sizes as gravity increased to the present day value.

Could gravity have been less in the past? My book is an attempt to explore the possibility.

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