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His stance was this. His wife had bought a can of mixed nuts, and he'd been messing around with them, shaking the can. He noticed as he did so that the largest nuts tended to sink to the bottom. He left his conclusions out, clearly as an exercise for the reader. His intent was clear, he was trying to say that dinosaur bones "sank" to the Earth's lower strata, which is why paleontologists think they lived a long long time ago.
I probably don't have to enumerate the problems with that "theory," but I'll give you a random sampling. One, the Earth is not a can of mixed nuts. Maybe if the entire Earth was one big sandy beach about 30 feet deep, with regular Earthquakes spread uniformly across its entire surface, his idea might have some weight. But it's not, and the geological strata scientists dig through to get to dinosaur bones (among other thing) is solid rock, so there's nothing for the bones to sink through. Also, despite public perception, dinosaurs weren't all huge monstrosities that made the Earth quake with every ponderous step. Just like now, dinosaurs (and the other animals alive at the time) came in all shapes and sizes. For his theory to be true, the largest dinosaurs would mostly be at the bottom of the Earth's crust, and the smallest would be at the top. This is not what we find when we go hunting dinosaur bones.
And perhaps most importantly, what this man did was not a scientific experiment. It was what's commonly known as "grasping at straws." Anyone can take some random observation and make a wild generalization based on it. Here's a few examples.
1) I threw a ball at the ground, and it came back up. How can gravity exist if the ball is allowed to travel away from the Earth?
2) I took a rock and threw it as hard as I could. It didn't travel to Miami as I expected, it instead landed not too far from me. Therefore airplanes cannot exist.
3) I own two dogs, and they mated and had puppies. Extinction can't be real.
4) I once climbed to the top of a tree, and I could still breathe. All those pansies at NASA don't have to waste my tax money building spacesuits, they should just cowboy up and breathe space air!
See? It's fun.
-Long Days and Pleasant Nights
