Di­nosaurs facts

Quaternary (now). At 190 tonnes in weight, blue whale is the largest known animal ever to have existed. The tallest and heaviest sauropod known from a complete skeleton weighed 23–37 tonnes. There were much larger sauropods, but they are known from only a few bones, and it is unlikely they matched a blue whale.

Gobi. The initial research works and discoveries of dinosaur fossil sites and their tracks in Mongolia started in the 1920s. Throughout this time, there have been many national and international field expeditions conducted in the country, and more than 80 genera of dinosaurs have been found in the Mongolian Gobi Desert.

About 230 million years ago. The oldest known findings of dinosaurs are about 230 million years old. Paleontologists think that the early dinosaur genus Eoraptor resembles the common ancestor of all dinosaurs; if this is true, its traits suggest that the first dinosaurs were small, bipedal predators.

Synapsids were the largest terrestrial vertebrates in the Permian period, 299 to 251 million years ago, although some of the larger pareiasaurs at the end of Permian could match them in size.