The Environment | What Were The Smallest And Largest Dinosaurs?
What were the smallest and largest dinosaurs?
Compsognathus, a carnivore (meat-eater) from the late Jurassic period (131 million years ago) was about the size of a chicken. It measured, at most, 35 inches (89 centimeters) from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail. It probably weighed no more than 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms).
The largest species for which a whole skeleton has been excavated is Brachiosaurus. A specimen in the Humboldt Museum in Berlin, Germany, is 72.75 feet (22.2 meters) long and 46 feet (14 meters) tall. It weighed an estimated 34.7 tons (31,480 kilograms). Brachiosaurus was a four-footed, plant-eating dinosaur with a long neck and a long tail. It lived from about 155 to 121 million years ago.
The largest meat-eating dinosaur, the skeleton of which was discovered in 1995 in western Argentina, was Giganotosaurus. This dinosaur lived about 97 million years ago. It was about 45 to...
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