Through these changes and expansions, the authorship includes contributions from 44 paleontologists from 13 countries to different chapters, still edited and compiled by Weishampel, Dodson, and Osmólska.

American paleontologist Kevin Padian noted that it is a good representation of the state of dinosaur research shortly before the time of its publication.

[4] Contributions in the first edition by David B. Norman, John Stanton McIntosh and Peter Galton on controversial theropods, sauropods, and prosauropods respectively were noted as particularly exhaustive.

[3][4] Some criticism of the first edition is the lack of empirical analyses for identifying phylogenetic relationships,[5] less sophistication in presentation than comparable works, and organization prioritizing speculative chapters ahead of their systematic framework.

However, many authors of the first edition were retained, resulting in some sections representing a divergence from more recent work, especially in the lack of expansion of sauropods and prosauropods into more than single chapters.