that's cool : >

would it have affected the size of dinosaurs too? some of them were so much bigger than anything alive today.

Also, free atmospheric oxygen was supposedly around 35% as against 21% today. That may also have had a lot to do with animal giantism (dinosaurs, insects, etc).

that seemed like a really intriguing and generally sensible paper to me, until I got to the end where he said it's been rejected by 20 journals for being "too radical"/"a waste of paper"/etc. - so I was wondering if there are any scientists around who can explain why this might strike the well educated editors of such publications as nonsense. Since I'm the layest of lay-scientists I wonder if I'm missing something obvious. Would atmospheric pressure change cause huge amounts of other unobserved anamolies or something?

Our understanding of dinosaur biology, particularly flight, is relatively limited compared to our understanding of rock chemistry. An enormous amount is known about the chemistry and formation of different mineral and rock types, and that knowledge is useful in estimating climatic conditions. Just one example: vesicle size distribution in basalts, which is a function of atmospheric pressure plus hydrostatic pressure of the overlying lava, can be used as a method to estimate paleoclimatic conditions, including atmospheric pressure. There are a number of other similar ways of measuring atmospheric pressure, which have been used to construct climatic models. This guy's theory contradicts these more direct estimates of atmospheric pressure.