Dragonfly (common skimmer) Libellulidae - 400 million year ancestry Photo by Harry Levin
Ten Essays in Re-examination of the Late
Paleozoic and Mesozoic Eras of Earth History
Introduction
I ask, as a proponent of a new, engineering systems approach to analysis of biogeological earth history, that this series of ten thought-provoking essays be put before the entire scientific community for open debate and testing.
Basic to these entire ten essays on earth history is the hypothesis that the plant phyla, the angiosperm and the gymnosperm, both originated during the Devonian Period, 408 to 360 million years ago. On almost every page, inquiry yields startling insights, like a symbiotic relationship between early mammals and dinosaurs involving deep-time parasitology and like causation of the large diversity of placental mammals and their rapid natural selection from oviparous to viviparous birth.
| Harry Levin: Vita Brevis Harry Levin holds the degree of Doctor of Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, University, 1949.  Harry Levin His 40-year-plus analytical research career spanned association with the Army Chemical Center (nuclear waste); the Whirlpool Corporation (radioisotope tracers); the Marquardt Corporation (nuclear rocket and ramjet engines); and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (photovoltaics). Before retiring in 1982, he authored many classified, company - confidential, and open - literature papers. He has been granted nine patents on ultra-pure silicon production. He remained active as engineering consultant until 1992. Now 88, he has made advances in photography by using new techniques to expedite and enhance close-up imagery, particularly of flowers, evident in Essay # 1. In 1997, he began probing into Paleozoic and Mesozoic earth history. In doing so, he has brought to light interacting ancient plant origins, plate tectonics, and climatology from present - day geographical distributions of plants and animals, as well as from the fossil record. His book of essays seeks, therefore, to become basic to a restructuring of the earth history of the late Paleozoic and the Mesozoic. |
Indeed,
throughout there occurs an amazing interweaving of a fish family, the
Cichlidae; the dinosaur families, Titanosauridae and
Abelisauridae;
gondwanatheres; ectoparasites; barnacles; and the prosimian Lemuridae,
each a touchstone, each joining with the plant phyla, the angiosperms
and the gymnosperms, to challenge the current store of geophysical
theory on the locations and biogeological relationships of Africa,
India, Madagascar, South America, Antarctica, and
Australia during
the late Paleozoic and the entire Mesozoic. Among the most important inquiries, my favorite gives answer to a seemingly trivial, childlike question: “Why do birds fly north to breed?” Here, indeed, is a baffling question for an ornithologist – yet, in truth, a magnificent question. In the elucidation given herein, the bird – the last remaining dinosaur -- puts to rest any question of its origin; and it reveals its specific line of descent while attesting to wonderful and unsuspected facts that governed the lives of dinosaurs. The bird, in answer to the question, calls to the fore the most important behavior characteristic of the dinosaur: namely, its migrations, motivated by a highly developed safe-nesting instinct. And finally, to one of the grandest puzzle of biogeological time, posed by Hooker and Darwin – the affinity of the rainforest trees of New Zealand and Chile – these essays offer solution: inquiry piles evidence upon evidence that New Zealand had been joined to South America as part of Gondwanaland until the Permo-Carboniferous Ice Age, when it broke loose and drifted, with its rainforest cover of angiosperms and gymnosperms, to the vicinity of Australia. “Science consists simply of the formulation and testing of hypotheses based on observational evidence.” Robert H. Dott, Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin.  Hakea petolaris 'Sea Urchin' Family Proteaceae Photo by Harry Levin
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