Some Dog Records

The tallest dog breed is the Irish Wolfhound—its height is 33-36 inches. Even though a Great Dane holds the record for the tallest individual dog, it is not the tallest breed—generally about 32 inches.

The St. Bernard is the heaviest dog breed, weighing up to 240 lb (110 kg). Its height is 27-35 inches.
The world's smallest dog breed is the Chihuahua.

The smallest mature dog on record was owned by Arthur Marples from Blackburn, England. The dog was a Yorkshire Terrier that was 2.5 inches high at its shoulder and weighed 4 ounces. It died in 1945 before the age of 2.

The heaviest dog on record weighed 343 lbs. Zobra, an English Mastiff, was not only the heaviest, but the longest dog on record, measuring 8 feet 3 inches. Though there are reports that Benedictine, a St. Bernard, weighed 357 lbs. Many websites still erroneously state that the heaviest dog ever weighed is 319 lbs.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the heaviest dog alive today is an English Mastiff named Hercules, from Massachusetts; it weighs 282 lbs.

The tallest dog on record was a Great Dane named Gibson from California. It measured 42.2 inches (107 cm) at the shoulder. (Guinness Book of Records, 2004)

The oldest dog on record, an Australian cattle (a Queensland Heeler) named Bluey, was 29 years, 5 months old when it died in 1939.

Laika, a female dog, was the first living creature to be launched into space. The former USSR launched her on the spacecraft Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. Laika died a few hours after takeoff. This experiment was followed later by the US, using chimpanzees instead of dogs.