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

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Millions of years are required for a piece of wood to become a piece of coal. But to make of it a piece of coal when ablaze, only a few hours are needed. When footprints of prehistoric animals are found in the coal surface of quarries, it is not necessary to assume that millions of years must be involved in the calculations.

Continents appeared and disappeared; mountains rose and fell; rivers lost their beds; and deep within the Earth, all geological strata boiled and turned over.

An animal fled upon the ground to save itself, or hid in a cave. The woods burned; the air high above was in flames; the ground became soft from the inside. The animal perished, but before perishing it left its mark -- its footprints.

The antiquity of the geological strata in which fossils are found is measured by tens and hundreds of millions of years. However, all conclusions of geology must be revised in a very definite manner. It is possible that not tens of millions of years lay between the full extinction of the large Dinosauria and our age, but only some thousands of years. The evolution of species, as it would proceed in a world not disturbed by catastrophes, would require for its course quite a different span of time than if cataclysms intervened; cataclysms could do in only hours or weeks for what evolution would require millennia to accomplish.

The huge extinct animals -- dinosaurs -- are classified as reptiles, and their time is called the Age of the Reptiles. It was supposed that in this early age no mammals existed; then skeletons of small wolf-like animals were discovered together with the bones of dinosaurs.

Brontosaurus is classified as one of the amphibious dinosaurs. It is more than sixty feet long and stands fourteen feet high. It has upright legs, with five tarsal bones and five digits on its feet, a roomy chest enclosed by well-curved ribs and should-blades, a large pelvis with a wide aperture; the teeth of this animal are confined to the front of the jaw. Brontosaurus is estimated to have weighed thirty tons.

Reptiles are crawling creatures and do not have upright legs; the four legs of the brontosaurs are unlike the legs of reptiles. Reptiles have a narrow pelvis, through the aperture of which they lay eggs; they do not bear their living young. The large pelvis of Brontosaurus suggests that this monster might have given birth to its young and did not lay eggs.

Diplodocus, another gigantic amphibious dinosaur, may also have been a mammal; likewise a beast (Triceratops) resembling the unicorn, with a large pelvis, too, seems to have been not a reptile but a mammal. "To the lay observer of the many restorations which we have of the long-vanished forms, tinged perhaps in part by the artist's knowledge of existing types, they do in frequent instances correspond so closely with existing mammals, notably Triceratops with the rhinoceros, that knowledge of their true place in nature cannot be assumed as understood."

[Comment: Lull in "Organic Adaptations to Environment," by G.E. Nichols, et al., Chapter VII, "Dinosaurian Climatic Response (Yale Univ. Press, 1924), pp. 225-226: The ceratopsians now appear to have been definite egg-layers. "One dinosaur that is unquestionably associated with its eggs is the small Mongolian Protoceratops. It is significant that the eggs are very large -- far larger relatively than those of reptiles -- so the offspring began life larger than many contemporary mammals and lizards." -- see Desmond, p. 202 and R.T. Bakker, "Dinosaur physiology and the origin of mammals," Evolution, 25 (1971), pp. 636-658. The Triceratops may still have been a mammal, however, since a present day group of mammals -- the monotremes -- do lay eggs. The duckbill platypus is the most typical and best known of the monotremes.]

The theriodont, a stout-body animal, skeletons of which have been found mainly in South Africa, is also regarded as a reptile of the Age of Reptiles. Not only did it carry its body on upright legs, but its teeth were differentiated into incisors, canines, and molars, as is the case in mammals, but not in reptiles.

"One of the most striking features in the skull of the theriodonts was the specialization of the teeth. In most reptiles the teeth are more or less alike, and they keep coming in during the life of the animal as fast as their predecessors are worn away or broken. In the theriodonts, however, there were some small front teeth, evidently for chewing and grinding, and between them some elongated, dagger-like teeth, evidently for slashing and tearing. Here we see an exact counterpart of the front incisors, the long pointed canines, and the grinding teeth (the pre-molars and molars) of the mammals." [E.H. Colbert, The Dinosaur Book, (American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., 1945), p. 58]

"It is not however the evidence of the skull and teeth alone that points to the direct descent of mammals from the theriodont reptiles. For in these remarkable reptiles, the vertebrae of the backbone, the shoulder-blade, the hip bones, the limbs and the feet, all show many characteristics that clearly foreshadowed the typical mammalian plan." [Ibid]

It is conceivable that mammals and reptiles are erroneously placed in the same class of Dinosauria. Camptosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Trachodon are clearly not mammals; the difference between their narrow pelvis and the wide pelvis of Brontosaurus is obvious even to non-students of paleontology. The latter may possibly have given birth to living creatures, who nursed at their udders; the former laid eggs.

If only the fossils of whales had been found, and the living animal were not know, the form of its skull with jaws and teeth, its body skeleton and tail, would suggest that it was a fish and not a mammal. But whales larger than the largest dinosaurs are found alive, and we know that they are mammals.

No fossil eggs of the brontosaur have been found; but fossil eggs of a narrow-pelvis dinosaur have turned up, for instance, in the Gobi Desert. I do not think that a fossil egg of the brontosaur will ever be discovered.