QQC Chapters 5 &6

This section of the text made me laugh a little bit. I thought it was funny to read about a great mind like Thomas Jefferson would doubt the existence of dinosaurs. Of course now this seems very trivial and silly, I can only imagine the controversy when the bones were first discovered. My question from this part of the text is; why hadn't people begun discovering bones from dinosaurs sooner? How did scientists first hypothesize about these new bones being from per-historic creatures?

Bryson Reading Chapter 4

"This was the suggestion that the Earth is not quite round. According to Newton's theory, the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin should result in a slight flatting at the poles and a bulging at the equator, which would make the planet slightly oblate. That meant that the length of a degree wouldn't be the same in Italy as it was in Scotland. Specifically, the length would shorten as you moved away from the poles. This was not good news for those people whose measurements of the Earth were based on the assumption that the Earth was a perfect sphere, which was everyone."

I thought that this quote from chapter 4 was very interesting. It is almost similar to my quote from last week because both talk about changing the publics belief. Its very interesting that people have been spending years just trying to figure out Earth's exact shape. What sort of things can we learn from the exact size and weight of our planet? Will those exact numbers relate to the creation of Earth and the Big Bang?