Dinosaur Facts and Figures. The Theropods and Other Dinosauriformes / Динозавры. Факты и цифры. Тероподы и другие динозаврообразные

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 Constant discoveries are making many of our previously held beliefs outdated.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.Under these circumstances, we found ourselves forced to be continually aware of everything being published about these wonderful animals. After years of consulting thousands of scientific articles, visiting museum collections, seeing in many blogs, forums, and social networks very interesting debates about which dinosaur was the largest or smallest, finding that inaccuracies plague different printed and virtual encyclopedias (although it would only be fair to note that they improve daily), observing that very few scientific papers answer these questions, and watching as even the famous Guinness World Records removed its section on dinosaurs a few years ago, for not meeting the demands of truthfulness, we decided to work on a book on dinosaur records that had never been done be-fore, by gathering records up to the year 2016. <...>