If there's an overall lesson to be gleaned from the prehistoric bestiaries of our childhood libraries, it's this: If you want to go extreme, go prehistoric. If you're curious about, say, the largest land animal that ever existed on Earth , you shouldn't be surprised — or disappointed — to learn that it is an extinct species.

Titans of the Past: The Titanosaurs

To determine the largest animal ever (stipulating that it was the largest land animal), we have to venture back to the age of the largest dinosaurs — specifically the preposterously proportioned titanosaur clade of giant sauropods, which lived over 66 million years ago.

But which among these long-necked, long-tailed quadrupeds was truly the largest?

As you might expect, it's here we confront the inherent incompleteness of the

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