Dinosaur Size Matters

When someone says dinosaur, what is the first image that pops into your mind? Most likely, the toothsome Tyrannosaurus rex, a lumbering sauropod like a Diplodocus, the Velociraptor as portrayed in the Jurassic Park movies. The big guys get the best press.

Dinosaurs came in a range of sizes. In fact, the Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey. Some of the reconstructions are from woefully incomplete skeletons. Some of those views were later revised, and should make paleontologists repent of their hasty assertions.

Spinophorosaurus, Wikimedia Commons / Nobumichi Tamura (CC BY 3.0)

Using good remains, there are a few candidates for the longest and for the most massive. With the bigly-huge connotations, people tend to disbelieve that dinosaurs could have fit onto Noah's Ark. Yes, they were the largest created land creatures, but there were those small ones as well. Noah would have brought juveniles. If scoffers would allow biblical creationists to present our view from both science and Scripture instead of loading us with arguments from ignorance and straw man fallacies, the idea of dinosaurs on the Ark makes sense.

A 1995 analysis concluded that the most common size (‘mode’) was about 1–10 tonnes (t).2 By comparison, today’s white rhinoceros and African elephant weigh about 2 and 6 t, respectively.

The scientist who conducted this analysis noted that the early researchers tended to collect more of the larger dinosaurs, while modern researchers have found a greater proportion of smaller dinosaurs. A further analysis in 2015 confirmed and refined that earlier research:

For tons and tonnes of interesting reading, you can read all of this short article at "How big were the dinosaurs, really?" There are some useful "Related Articles" below it.