Shallow, near-surface magma emplacement into a porous, unlithified sandstone occurred by forceful dike dilation and was accompanied by a localized hydrothermal event. Petrographic fabric, authigenic mineralogy and petrophysical data, grade smoothly through the quartzite contact zone outward into the friable Inmar sandstone of Makhtesh Ramon, Israel. Quartz grain deformation, fracturing and rehealing of grains, and pressure solution constitute overwhelming evidence of a compressive environment adjacent to dike margins, albeit with temperatures and pressures insufficient to fully recrystallize detrital grains. Dikes were accommodated primarily by the repacking of the sandstone with both brittle and elastic grain interaction. Post emplacement heating together with elastic compressive stress dissipation, lead to fracture healing and pressure solution. The occasional columnar-jointing must be related to thermal contraction of the quartzite during later cooling and resulting mode I cracks. The alteration of both contact zone and dike material occurred via a transitory and confined hydrothermal seepage up dike margins. Elsewhere around the world highly altered intrusions bordered by indurated sometimes uniformly jointed sediments, may also be the result of forceful magma emplacement and hydrothermal alteration at near-surface levels.

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 Constant discoveries are making many of our previously held beliefs outdated.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.

Dinosaurs are everywhere these days. They are the most popular exhibits in many museums, the stars of movies and the focus of television documentaries, the pitchmen in advertising campaigns and the subject of gushing articles in magazines and newspapers. Looking at how dinosaurs are portrayed in the popular press, it is easy to lump them together with leprechauns, unicorns, and dragons – creatures of myth and iconic lore that only exist in the imaginations of children and the whimsy of pop culture. But dinosaurs are not creatures of fantasy – they were real animals, of many fantastic shapes and sizes, that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for an astounding span of over 160 million years. They were living, breathing, feeding, moving, reproducing, evolving organisms that originated in the

aftermath of the worst mass extinction in earth history, rose to dominance as a supercontinent was splitting and climates were fluctuating, evolved into some of the largest and most fearsome animals the planet has ever seen, and then suddenly went extinct right at the same time that a giant comet or asteroid slammed into the earth and supervolcanoes were belching rivers of lava. And perhaps most astonishing of all, these ancient creatures, so often symbols of lethargy and failure, were the ancestors of one of the most successful groups of living animals: the birds. <...>

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. <...>