Elephants are among the animal species to which humans feel a particular affinity, despite being separated by at least 80 million years of evolution. Their intelligence and complex social lives, as well as their size as the largest land animals, captivate us. Elephants belong within a larger group of animals called Proboscidea, named for their proboscis, or trunk, but only three proboscidean species survive today – the Asian and African elephants, the latter recently divided into forest and savanna species. All the rest are extinct – an astonishing array of forms known only from their fossils, ranging in size from early species no bigger than a domestic cat, to the largest up to three times the body mass of the living species, according to the authors’ calculations. 

Which dinosaur was the largest? What about the smallest? The oldest? These are questions that most children and quite a few adults have asked themselves. Answering such questions has never been easy, and doing so nowadays is even more troublesome. The science of paleontology is evolving at unprecedented speed. Constant discoveries are making many of our previously held beliefs outdated. Preventing one’s knowledge from becoming obsolete requires constant attention. New technology and the vast number of studies published each year suggest that a real revolution in dinosaur paleontology (dinosaurology) is occurring—so much so, that buying a book on dinosaurs published in 1995 is as useful to us today as having a look at a catalog of mobile phones from the year 2005.

In the first volume of this series, on theropod dinosaurs, readers were able to appreciate the surprising variety of forms and sizes in which this group of animals developed, from just a few grams to heavier than an African elephant. Some species are believed to have run very fast, some had incredibly powerful bite forces, and across all species there was extreme diversity in diet (most were carnivores, although others were phytophagous, pescivorous, insectivorous, or omnivorous) as well as modes of locomotion (on land, in water, and even in the air). And as we now know, dinosaurs are still among us; modern-day birds are the direct descendants of non-avian theropods.
This new volume is perhaps even more astounding, as it allows us to admire the largest land animals ever to walk the Earth. Some of them were almost as heavy as the largest whales in our oceans today, and a few were almost four times as tall as a giraffe. Even the most primitive of this group of dinosaurs, sauropodomorphs, were genuine record-breakers. <...>