If I were, at about age twenty as a budding paleozoologist and paleoartist, handed a copy of this book by a mysterious time traveler, I would have been shocked as well as delighted. The pages would have revealed a world of new sauropod and related dinosaurs and ideas that I barely had a hint of or had no idea existed at all. My head would have spun at the revelation of the neck spines of Amargasaurus and of sauropods so colossal that they not only gave the giant baleen whales a run for their money in terms of sheer  bulk but could feed over six stories high in tree crowns—and took only a few decades to get to those sizes!

I have been a lifelong dinosaur enthusiast. At the age of four, I created what my mother has dubbed my “first research paper”: a stack of illustrations of every different species I could find throughout the pages of my many dinosaur books.

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. <...>