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. <...>

In 1842, the British comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892) coined the word dinosaur. Owen constructed this word from the Greek words deinos, meaning “terrible” (though Owen considered it to mean “fearfully great”), and sauros, meaning “lizard” or “reptile.” To Owen, the “fearfully great lizards” were large, extinct reptiles known from only a handful of fossils discovered in western Europe since the 1820s. Today, dinosaur fossils are known from all continents and represent thousands of distinct types of dinosaurs.
In this chapter, I briefly answer some basic questions about dinosaurs and introduce some topics discussed at greater length in this book.

The past of Australia is the most mysterious of the history of all the continents. Much of its landscape is the oldest in the world. Its heartland seemed almost uninhabitable to the Europeans who came during the last two centuries, and yet it was inhabited—by Aborigines who had come thousands of years before and by a fauna unlike any other in the world. Where the Aborigines came from and when they came is still a subject of debate: the last twenty million years of the history of the marsupial fauna has been intensely studied and is now well understood—a mere tick of the clock in the history of this continent. <...>

To write about our continuing exploration of the Gobi Desert—an adventure that is still unfolding—is rather odd, as if my reflection on the serendipity behind various events and discoveries had anything to do with predicting the future of our efforts. Nonetheless, enough has been experienced to justify my recollection. I also felt the sheer panic of loosing vivid feelings and images before I could flesh them out in any form beyond random notes in my field journals. As a result, I had the sheer pleasure of revisiting these experiences in a small room of an old eastern Atlantic Victorian house, about as far away from the land of camels, sand dunes, and
dinosaur graveyards as one can imagine. <...>