Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word dinosaur means terrible lizard and was coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1842. He intended it to evoke not only the animals' fearsome teeth and claws but also their size and majesty. Owen introduced the name Dinosauria in the revised text of a talk published in April 1842.
Yes, birds are dinosaurs. They evolved from earlier theropods during the Late Jurassic and are the only dinosaur lineage to survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event roughly 66 million years ago. Birds belong to Saurischia, the lizard-hipped dinosaurs, and number over 10,800 living species.
The largest sauropod dinosaurs are estimated to have reached lengths of 39.7 meters and heights of 18 meters, the largest land animals of all time. The Museo Municipal Carmen Funes in Argentina holds an Argentinosaurus mount 39.7 meters long, while the controversial titanosaur Bruhathkayosaurus was estimated in 2023 to reach up to 44 meters.
The smallest dinosaur known is the bee hummingbird, at only 5 centimeters long with a mass of around 1.8 grams. The smallest known non-avialan dinosaur described from an adult specimen is Anchiornis huxleyi, estimated at 110 grams with a skeletal length of 34 centimeters.
The Bone Wars were a fierce rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who raced to find new dinosaurs in the United States. The feud lasted more than 30 years and ended in 1897 when Cope died after spending his entire fortune. Marsh unearthed 86 new species and Cope discovered 56.
Research since the 1970s indicates dinosaurs were active animals with elevated metabolisms. John Ostrom's 1969 description of Deinonychus pointed to an active, likely warm-blooded predator, and fibrolamellar bone tissue indicates consistently fast growth. In 2005 Mary Higby Schweitzer reported preserved soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus femur whose collagen sequences grouped it with birds.