what is the largest dinosaur that ever lived?
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The largest dinosaur currently known is Argentinosaurus, from the Cretaceous of Argentina (strangely enough).\n\nIt was a huge, sauropod dinosaur (brontosaur-type, skinny at one end, thick in the middle, and then skinny again at the other end).\n\nEstimates of its size based on the morphology of the bones, and comparing it with other species of sauropod indicate that Argentinosaurus was up to 120 feet long, and around 100 tons in weight.\n\nTyrannosaurus was one of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs around (some, such as Spinosaurus and the recently discovered Mapusaurus were even bigger), but these carnosaurs didn't get above about 8 tons in weight.\n\nThe largest critter what ever lived is the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) which can be up to 150 tons, and happily still survives today.
297152
The average size of a dinosaur was about the size of a goat. Sure brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus rex were enormous, but there were far more numerous species that were smaller. By contrast a human being is a very large being on earth today. Sure there is a blue whale, and an elephant, but those are just two species and there are over 180,000 classified species of small insects for instance, versus just two large species there. Then rodents there are numerous species more than say hippo or rhino, etc.\n\nBeing smaller has it's advantages. A crocodile maybe used to be 50 feet but now it's 20 feet. Being smaller means you have a smaller belly to feed to fill up during food shortages and this could mean the difference between surviving and reproducing or starving and dying. Also sharks seems much smaller today than megalodon, a 50 foot shark, for similar reasons.
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One of the clearest sign of a massive impact was massive extinction of life. The greatest extinction event sometimes called the Great Dying was the Permian-Triassic extinction. It occurred approximately 251 million years ago (mya), forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods. It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with about 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct. Recently, a 300-mile-wide crater was discovered in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, which is believed to be linked with the extinction.\n\nA 300-mile-wide crater more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was found using gravity fluctuations measured by NASA's GRACE satellites to peer beneath Antarctica's icy surface, imaging a 200-mile-wide plug of mantle material—a mass concentration, or "mascon" in geological parlance—that occurs within the Earth's crust and appears to have been emplaced somewhere between 100 and 500 million years ago—a broad time span that brackets the specific age of the Permian-Triassic extinction.\n\nWhen the scientists overlaid their gravity image with airborne radar images of the ground beneath the ice, they found the mascon perfectly centered inside a circular ridge some 500 km (300 miles) wide. The Wilkes Land crater is more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, which marks the impact that may have ultimately killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub impactor (most likely an asteroid) is thought to have been 6 miles wide, while the Wilkes Land impactor (either an asteroid or perhaps a large comet nucleus) could have been up to 30 miles wide—four or five times as wide.
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Adapted from Dinosaurs: The Very Latest Information and Hands-On Activities From the Museum of the Rockies, by Liza Charlesworth and Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer. A Scholastic Professional Book.\n\nWay back in 1676, Robert Plot, the curator of an English museum, described and drew a thigh bone that he believed belonged to a giant man. Although that fossil disappeared without a trace, the surviving illustration suggests that it may well have been part of a "Megalosaurus." Later, in 1822, large teeth discovered in England by Mary Ann Mantell and her husband, Gideon, were thought to be the remains of a huge and extinct iguana. It wasn't until 1841 that British scientist Richard Owen came to realize that such fossils were distinct from the teeth or bones of any living creature. The ancient animals were so different, in fact, that they deserved their own name. So Owen dubbed the group "Dinosauria," which means "terrible lizards."\n\nAcross the ocean in North America, dinosaur tracks were studied in the Connecticut Valley, beginning in the 1830's. They were believed to belong to enormous ravens, freed from Noah's Ark after the Great Flood. At that time, paleontology was long on deduction and short on evidence. This was remedied when two wealthy and competitive American scientists, Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope, raced to excavate fossils in the Rocky Mountain region. In the late 1800's, their separate teams, armed against Native Americans and each other, dug up tons of bones from several sites. All in all, Marsh and Cope's rivalry — known as the Bone Wars — uncovered 136 new species. And their respective fossil displays generated excitement for dinosaurs the world over.\n\nIn the 1900's, enthusiasm for dinosaurs grew steadily, attracting the attention of the scientific community. Institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History assembled dig teams, which uncovered many rich bone beds in North America (as did their counterparts overseas). New sites in Utah revealed several different species, including "Camarasaurus," "Apatosaurus," and "Stegosaurus;" "Tyrannosaurus rex" remains were found in Montana and baby Coelosaurs in New Mexico.\n\nIn recent decades, dinosaur research continues, but the emphasis has shifted from finding and classifying these animals to analyzing and reconstructing their lives and habitats. In the late 1960's, Robert Bakker proposed that these ancient creatures may well have been as agile and energetic as warm-blooded animals. In the mid 1970's, Peter Dodson, along with James Farlow, hypothesized that they used their horns to attract the attention of females, as well as for fighting. And in the late 1970's, Jack Horner made history by identifying some of the first dinosaurs nests and eggs in North America. These important "Maiasaura" fossils helped to determine that some species nested in colonies and cared for their young.\n\nIn the past few years, several paleontologists, including Ken Carpenter, Phil Currie, and William Coombs, have identified juvenile dinosaurs that were previously thought to be adults; and David Weishampel has theorized that some dinosaurs probably used their crests and nasal passages to create sound. Each day, scientists working all over the world, in the field and in research labs, help to redefine the meaning of the world "dinosaur."
175334
Never heard of a one-clawed dinosaur... one that has a single big claw is velociraptor. Don't know too much about the "hopping" part either, because dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years and we can never know for sure.
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Thye lived a long time ago, and the closest living relative to the dinosaurs is the crocodile.  Crocodiles have remained unchanged for 1000's of years.
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As far as I know the largest bee or wasp in the world is the Japanese giant wasp (Vespa mandarinia).  They are big, fierce, nasty-tempered beasts, but they 'only' reach 2 inches in length, not feet.\n\nHere is little National Geographic article about them. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1025_021025_GiantHornets.html\n\nThe largest flying insect ever known, Meganeura was a dragonfly that lived about 280 million years ago.  It had a wingspan of close to 2 feet, but it's body was not that long, nor as robust as a bee's or wasp's body would be.\n\nIf there was a 2 foot long bee in a museum it is likely that it was a model mock-up, blown up in size for dramatic purposes and/or to show details that would be hard to see on a life-size display.
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Eggs are laid by birds and cold-blooded reptiles. The largest eggs by far were laid by dinosaurs.
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About 250 million yrs.\n\nOne lap ago was the age of the dinosaurs.
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Argentinosaurus is the largest which has been well constructed from fossils, and paelontologists estimate that full-grown specimens reached some 35 metres (115 feet)in length. (according to wikipedia - Science Daily quoted it at 40 m)\n\nWeight was perhaps 80 to 100 tonnes. It is the largest dinosaur that we have good evidence for. \n\nHowever, it would be smaller than Bruhathkayosaurus, which may have reached 44 metres (145 feet) long and weighed 180 tons and the poorly known Amphicoelias fragilmmus which may have been up to 60 meters (200 feet) long. However, these estimates cannot be validated due to lack of evidence.\n\nBTW, Brontosaurus is properly known as Apatosaurus.\nGigantosaurus is what's known as a 'wastebasket taxon'; a grouping for titanosaurs who didn't fit elsewhere. Giganotosaurus was the largest Allosaurid, a type of meat-eating dinosaur.
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the largest living thing is not plant or animal it is a fungus that covers 2200 acres of land and is 2400 years old in Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. the species name is Armillaria ostoyae
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isn't it obvious? the triceratops of course!\n\nhere's a site to prove it...
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The biggest dinosaur currently known is generally conceded to be Argentinosaurus, a huge sauropod (brontosaur-type) from the late Cretaceous of South America.  Extrapolation from the size of the fossilized bones found indicates that Argentinosaurus was up to 120 feet long and weighed in the neighbourhood of 100 tons.  The maximum weight estimate for a huge dinosaur like Tyrannosaurus was 8 tons, so Argentinosaurus was massive even for a dinosaur.\n\nAs to how some animals survived, while others did not is one of the big, big mysteries of the KT extinction event.  Why did pterosaurs all go extinct, but birds survive?  Why did ammonites and belemnites all go extinct, but sharks and nautilus survive?  Why did giant marine reptiles like mosasaurs and icthyosaurs go extinct, while crocodiles and snakes survived?  Some of those are hard to explain if an asteroid impact was the sole reason for the extinctions.  The general consensus seems to be that there were a large number of factors such as continental shifts creating faunal interchange between long isolated populations, which could spread disease among dinosaurs.  The continental shifts would also have altered ocean currents, changing environments and climate, and altering existing eco-systems (especially some of the rich shallow seas that existed at the time).  Adaptive radiation of flowering plants (Angiosperms) in the late Cretaceous may have caused stress on those animals that were dependent on the competing Gymnosperm plants.  Co-evolution of many insects in response to the radiation of Angiosperms may have somehow favoured the survival of the birds over the pterosaurs.  \n\nThen when the asteroid impact occurred, it was the straw that broke the camel's back for many of these species that were under intense pressure, but other species were able to survive.
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the largest EVER depends on us finding the fossils of the largest. \n\nAmoung the largest are \n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolasuchus    at five meters long \n\nWikipedia claims the crocodile-like Prionosuchus, reached a length of 9 m (30 ft). but I do not have on-line access to the original published description,and find none on-line.
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Sadly, there are no dinosaurs left living today.  All evidence indicates that they completely died out 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period.\n\nThere is some evidence to indicate that birds are descended from one branch of the dinosaurs (not everyone agrees on this), and so in some sense it could be said that dinosaurs are not truly extinct, but that's like saying that since we're still around the Australopithecines are not extinct.  \n\nThe animals that bear the characteristic features that lead them to be classified as dinosaurs are indeed extinct.\n\nCrocodiles and alligators are somewhat related to the ancestors of the dinosaurs, but are not and never were dinosaurs themselves.  They share some of the features of the dinosaurs (teeth set in socketed roots in the jaw etc.), and are the most 'advanced' reptiles alive today, but they are not dinosaurs.\n\nThere are some who claim that creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster ('Nessie') are Plesiosaurs that somehow managed to survive for millions of years, but there is very little evidence to suggest that Nessie actually exists, and even if she did, Plesiosaurs were not Dinosaurs.  They're Plesiosaurs, a totally different lineage with considerably divergent skull morphology from the Dinosaurs.\n\nThere is a creature rumoured to exist deep in the jungles of the Congo, known as Mkele Mbembe.  Descriptions of Mkele Mbembe sound as though they might (might) be describing a small sauropod Dinosaur of some kind.  If Mkele Mbembe exists (doubtful), and it turns out that it is indeed a living Dinosaur (also doubtful) then we would have a living Dinosaur still on the planet, and we'd have to try and figure out why no Dinosaur fossils have shown up anywhere on Earth in that 65 million year span.
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THE ARGENTINOSAURUS IS ESTIMATED AT 125 FEET LONG AND WEIGHED 90 TO 110 TONS.\nTHE SEISMOSAURUS IS ESTIMATED TO BE 110 FEET LONG AND WEIGH ABOUT 45 TONS.\nTO  LEARN MORE GO TO WIKIPEDIA THE ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA
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Technically dinosaurs were not even known to have exist until the first evidence was discovered in either the 18th or 19th century. In the book of Genesis note: not to be interepted literally!! It states ( after the life in the sea,animals on land) Sorry I can't quote exactly however; look at all the animals that exist. The Bible would be a LONG book!