Most dinosaurs were enormous, the largest animals to walk the land. However, large dinosaurs were not typical. Most dinosaurs didn't exceed 30 feet in length, and the tail was bluff - it doubled its length of the animals without adding much to its weight.
Which Dinosaurs Were The Biggest?
The largest dinosaurs were certainly the sauropods: Apatosaurus and his friends. They ate only plants and spent much of their time in swamps, where they are safe from the meat-eating dinosaurs. It was easier for them to move in water anyway.
In deep water they pushed themselves along with their front legs and steered with their tails. The sauropod dinosaur all had very tiny heads. Their nostrils were on the top of their heads so they could breathe when they were swimming.
Sauropods not only had long legs but long necks as well. The best reason to have a long neck, as a giraffe would tell you, is to reach high up into trees to browse on luxuriant fodder that other animals cannot reach, and to see if danger is coming. However, the long neck of the dinosaur and the giraffe are two different things. A very large giraffe could barely reach 19 feet off the ground. Among sauropods, a fifteen-foot neck starting from a platform of ten feet off the ground was strictly routine.
They were undoubtedly slow-moving, though they covered long distances with their long legs.
What Happens If You Get Too Big?
If you grow too much, your weight would increase faster than the strength of the body parts that hold you together. That means your weight would eventually crush your leg bones. The bigger you get, then, the weaker you get.
This is probably why dinosaurs never got any bigger than Ultrasaurus. It's also why elephants, the biggest animals on land today, have got extra-strong leg bones and chunky feet. Ultrasaurus is the biggest dinosaur, so far. If it stood on tiptoe, it could peek through a six-story window. From its nose to the tip of the tail, it was as long as three scool buses and weighed more than 20 elephants.
Were All Dinosaur Huge?
A lot of people think dinosaur were massively huge, big enough to reach the treetops. But there were also tiny dinosaurs, ones that would not even reach your knee. Among the smallest are Compsognathus - agile, crafty meat-eaters, some no heavier than a cat and about two feet long. The very smallest dinosaur is a hatchling that is knee-high to a pigeon.
Nanosaurus and Othniella both ranged down to two feet.
Psittacosaurus was a dinosaur of the last third of the Age Of Dinosaurs. It came from Mongolia and was about four and one-half feet. the smallest is a skull that measures barely an inch long. The length of this animal would have been about nine inches.
Probably the next smallest baby was a prosauropod, Mussaurus, from South America. Its skull measures an inch and a quarter long, the entire animal having been only 12 or 13 inches long.
![[Dinosaurs Sizes]](./buttons/sizes.jpg)
