Dinosaurs had small genomes. At least some of them did--the ones that gave rise to birds. If you have access to Science, you can read my News Focus article on the new field of "dinogenomics." As I mentioned last week, my web site carlzimmer.com is in serious overhaul, so as soon as it's ready, I'll post a copy of the article there, too.
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Olivia Judson (aka, Dr. Tatiana) has a blog at the NYTimes website.
Genome size can be measured in a variety of ways. Classically, the haploid content of a genome was measured in picograms and represented as the C-value.