Dinosaur Pictures
Browse through pics of amazing, extinct animals.
Extinct Animals
Dinosaurs were animals that dominated the earth for over 160 million years. Around 65 million years ago, a catastrophic extinction event ended dinosaurs' dominance on land. The first dinosaur fossils were recognized in the nineteenth century and mounted dinosaur skeletons have become major attractions at museums around the world.
More on Dinosaurs
Huge Animals
Most dinosaurs, however, were much smaller than the giant sauropods. Current evidence suggests that dinosaurs were comparable to the weight of a grizzly bear or weighed about as much as a giraffe.
Giants
Dinosaurs were very large animals. Even by dinosaur standards, sauropods were gigantic. For much of the dinosaur era, the smallest sauropods were larger than anything else in their habitat, and the largest were an order of magnitude more massive than anything else that has since walked the Earth. Only a handful of modern aquatic animals approach or surpass them in size, like the blue whale, which weighs up to 209 tons and 110 feet in length.
Dinosaur Fossils
Only a tiny percentage of animals ever fossilize, and most of these remain buried in the earth. Few of the specimens that are recovered are complete skeletons, and impressions of skin and other soft tissues are rare.
Guessing Game
Rebuilding a complete skeleton is often a process of educated guesswork. As a result, scientists will probably never be 100 percent certain of the largest and smallest dinosaurs.
Tallest and Heaviest
The tallest and heaviest dinosaur known from good skeletons is Brachiosaurus. Its remains were discovered in Tanzania between 1907 and 1912. Bones from multiple similarly-sized individuals were incorporated into the skeleton now mounted and it is 38 feet tall, 74 feet long, and would have belonged to an animal that weighed between 33 to 66 short tons.
Complete Find
The longest complete dinosaur is the 89 foot-long Diplodocus, which was discovered in Wyoming in the United States and displayed in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Natural History Museum in 1907
Herbivores
There were larger dinosaurs, but knowledge of them is based entirely on a small number of fragmentary fossils. Most of the largest herbivorous specimens on record were all discovered in the 1970s or later, and include the Supersaurus, which is guessed to have been 130 feet long, and the tallest, the 60-foot Sauroposeidon, which could have reached a sixth-floor window.
Small Dinos
Not including modern birds like the bee hummingbird, the smallest dinosaurs known were about the size of a crow or a chicken. The theropods Microraptor and Parvicursor were both under 2 feet in length.
Meat Eaters
Other large meat-eaters included Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex and Carcharodontosaurus.
