Last year I told you all how I enjoyed attending the first ever DinoconUK held in the UK. It was great fun and I’m pleased to say it was just as enjoyable this year. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my fascination that palaeontologists can reconstruct the animals that lived 100s of millions of years ago in such impressive detail.
My curiosity about dinosaurs is related to my interest in palaeogravity. It is obvious that the whole scale of life was larger in the past. Since we know that the current scale of life is limited by surface gravity it is possible to calculate that palaeogravity was less in past.
Other methods give similar results. The bone strength of dinosaurs also indicates a reduced palaeogravity. The gigantic pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus would struggle to fly in our present surface gravity, but it would fly very well in a reduced palaeogravity.
Another interesting outing was to the Carboniferous Period fossil site in Brymbo, North Wales, organised by my local Liverpool Geological Society. This fossil site is dated at 317 million years old, well before dinosaurs evolved. In my book I explained how the relative scale of life such as dragonflies and centipedes were much larger due the reduced palaeogravity. More recently I’ve also looked at sea scorpions and true scorpions. They all give similar estimates for palaeogravity during the Carboniferous.
I told you all about the Wikipedia Editing War on the Expanding Earth theory some time ago, and I look at the Wikipedia entry for Expanding Earth every so often just to see if anything has changed. The front page has hardly changed at all, but behind the front page we can see that various editors are still constantly deleting any evidence for Earth expansion. If you click on the Talk section on the front page and then look at Contemporary References on Earth Expansion you can see it happening.
One recent attempt to add Earth expansion articles written by Giancarlo Scalera (2022) and James Maxlow (2020) - as an example of independent contributions reflecting ongoing scientific perspectives on expansion-based geodynamics - was quickly removed with the claim they were “non-notable people”. It’s a strange allegation since both of them are leaders in Earth expansion research. As anyone who knows anything about Earth expansion recognises, they are two of the most notable current researchers into Earth expansion.
You might wonder why anyone would be so desperate to remove these recent references from the Expanding Earth page. The answer is at the top of the Wikipedia Expanding Earth page where we are told “the idea has been abandoned” and is “considered a pseudoscience”. It would be obvious that these allegations were lies if the editors allowed recent Earth expansion articles to be added - perhaps with just a few articles from 2020-24 or 2025-29 for example.
The Wikipedia editors are obviously desperate to stop you thinking about Earth expansion. I’m sure they would also quickly remove any reference to Dr. James Maxlow’s new book, Plate Tectonics: A Paradigm Shift in Thinking, published this year (2026) by Academica Press.
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Dr James Maxlow’s new 2026 book, Plate Tectonics: A paradigm shift in thinking. Published by Academica Press and widely available from all good publishers.
See Books Section for more details.
So what don’t they want you to know? Well, the new book details how the size of the ancient Earth can be calculated by reconstructing models of the ancient Earth. When these models first started being reconstructed, by people like Hugh Owen, Klaus Vogel and Jan Koziar, the exact age of the ocean floor wasn’t known in as much detail as today. This meant that early reconstructions weren’t particularly accurate. Over decades of research the age of the ocean floor became better known and the models improved so they can now be reconstructed like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to 99% accuracy.
James Maxlow’s new book has a whole chapter on how the modern age of the ocean floor maps can be used reconstruct ancient models of the Earth. The method is explained in detail. This is the very essence of science were data is shared so it can be reproduced and checked by other people.
The concept of plate tectonics is that as the continents moved and crashed into each
other they just happened to form the exact shapes required to allow them to fit together
on a smaller diameter Earth. Here is a concept that I checked several years ago by
working out the probability that the ancient continents would form the exact shapes
required to fit together by chance. In my book I had suggested a cautious estimate
of less than one in a million chances but I later wrote a computer program to estimate
a more exact figure. My original estimate for the Expanding Earth forming by chance
alone was massively conservative. It isn’t less than one chance in a million, or
billion, or even a trillion. It’s less than one chance in an octillion: a number
so large I needed to look up its name.
On Wikipedia, palaeomagnetic studies are given as conclusive proof of a non-expanding Earth by cherry-picking just one science paper that supports that view. In practice there have been numerous science papers giving results ranging from non-expansion to expansion of the Earth. Van Hilten (1965) considered these conflicting views on the ancient radii of the Earth and concluded “there appear to be no noteworthy differences in information [used] so the conflict seemed to be a matter of interpretation”.
There is a whole chapter about palaeomagnetics in James Maxlow’s new book, covering pages 159 to 187 in Chapter 12. He starts with an observation given by Storetvedt (1992), “The many geophysical and geological paradoxes that have accumulated during the past two or three decades are apparently the consequences of forcing observational data into an inadequate tectonic model”. Maxlow then explains how these paradoxes are resolved with Earth expansion. The conclusion that “…there has been no significant change in ancient radius of the Earth with time” by McElhinny and Brock (1975) is examined in detail to show how misinterpretation of the results gives the wrong conclusion of a non-expanding Earth. Maxlow notes that “small Earth geological modelling studies have now reached a point where additional palaeomagnetic evidence can be introduced…”
It’s interesting to see that all these efforts to dismiss Earth expansion are successful with the new A.I. systems that just repeat the ideas spouted by the Wikipedia editors. It would seem that A.I. isn’t intelligent enough to check if the idea has been abandoned before asserting it as a fact - perhaps with a simple search on Google Scholar for example. Hopefully, as A.I. becomes more intelligent it will begin to check the facts it is asserting.
A recent task I’ve started is to copy all your Facebook and Twitter comments to the bottom of the web page they relate to. This is because some of your comments seem to have started to disappear off Facebook and Twitter – I’ve no idea why. It also gives me the opportunity to repair any links that have broken on old web pages.
I wish you all a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
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Page last updated 27 Oct 2026
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