Ian Plimer – ‘Telling Lies For God’ (Random House: Sydney,1994) …..

p.194 The generally accepted size of the ark is 155 metres long, 25 metres wide and 15 metres high and it was to contain three decks, a side-opening door and a one-cubit square window at the top.

p. 104 It is fairly safe to assume that Noah had never seen a kangaroo, so how did Noah know what size cage to build on the ark for a pair of kangaroos?

p. 106 …did Noah really know that a pair of elephants eats 300 kilograms of greenery per day … It is of particular interest to speculate how Noah would have housed and fed the 10 000 known species of termites on the wooden ark. The termites must have developed an appetite for ‘gopher wood’ and such an appetite must surely have weakened an already overcrowded, overloaded boat.

p. 108 The total amount of water carried for the animals would have sunk the ark, the total weight of provisions would have sunk the ark, the total weight of vertebrates would have sunk the ark many times, the amount of excreta generated would have sunk the ark every five days and the aquarium for a pair of whales would have sunk the ark many times. Furthermore, if a couple of large animals had the urge to procreate, the ark would become terribly unstable. Imagine if the two-tonne Ultrasaurus dinosaurs converted the snaking stinking sinking overcrowded freighter into a love boat. The ark would have capsized!

p. 110 On the assumption that the animals came on two by two (and not seven pairs), each animal would have some 1150 cubic centimetres (I.e. the volume of a milk carton) of shipboard space for the 371 days at sea … cages and crates for animals must be much larger than their body size ….How did Noah know to build a system to preserve fresh Eucalyptus leaves for the koala passengers from Australia, which was then undiscovered …?

p. 112 Coral survives in warm, nutrient-poor, clear, shallow ocean waters . No coral would have survived.

p. 113 Even if by some great coincidence, these five [Noah, his wife and three daughters-in-law] had no genetic variant in common, it would still not be possible to have the genetic diversity we see today.

p. 114 Some organism don’t survive as a couplet. For example bees, flies and other organisms live in swarms and without community activity neither function nor survive.

p. 115 How did Noah see the pairs of microscopic bacteria come on to the ark?

p. 117 Noah and his family would have shared this tiny ark with 30 million pairs of known and extinct organisms. ….The Bible tells us that all the organisms were loaded in a 24-hour day (Genesis 7:11-15) thereby requiring 460 organisms per second to enter the ark over this period.

p. 125 Humans are the only host for numerous diseases including measles, pneumococcal pneumonia, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox. leprosy, poliomyelitis, five types of syphilis and gonorrhoea, AIDS, hepatitis, shingles, four types of malarial parasites, two types of tapeworm, an intestinal worm, hookworm, three agents of filariasis, two species of Schistosoma, pinworm, three types of lice, various types of fever (for example, Japanese river fever), kuru, just to mention a few. … The transmission of kuru must have placed inordinate ethical burdens on the already overtaxed Noah. Kuru is only transmitted by cannibalism, by eating the brains of another human afflicted with the disease. … Noah’s family must have carried a veritable hospital of diseases because this was the only way that diseases endemic to hominoids could have survived the ‘Great Flood’.

p. 126 The magnitude of the feeding task is astronomical. if the few of four males worked 24 hours a day for the 371 days at sea, then each animal would have received a total of six seconds attention for the whole year. In the six seconds, the animals would have to be fed and watered at least 371 times and presumably the stalls had to be cleaned in order to avoid the outbreak of disease.

p. 128 … thousands of tonnes of urine and excreta were generated on a daily basis … the ark had a ventilation port of one cubit square so the atmosphere below decks was obviously indescribably fetid.

p. 129 …one wonders how Noah avoided the spontaneous combustion of the monstrous volumes of methane-oxygen mix below decks.

p. 132 If the Priestly version of the ark myth is true, then we should not have ravens today as we lost one of the breeding couple.

p. 133 [After the flood] Why did the new world primates return to South America, the very area where their fossil ancestors thrived? How did flightless birds, some up to three metres in size and 300 kilograms in weight, manage to swim tens of thousands of kilometres to remote islands such as Mauritius (dodo), Reunion (solitaire), Rodriguez (white dodo), New Caledonia (kagu) and New Zealand (moa)? …. After the ‘Great Flood’, we are expected to believe that the double coconut was transported only to the Seychelles, the eucalypt only to Australia and the Andean alpine flora only to South America, and to nowhere else in the whole wide world.