29/31: Biggest Animals
This is an easy answer right? The biggest animal in the world is the blue whale, what can be bigger than that? Well, yeah it’s true. The blue whale is the biggest animal that ever existed according to what we know right now and the fossil records we have available at this moment. With a length of almost 30 m and weighting with an average weight of 140 tons there has never been any animal bigger than that, or at least no animal of that size has left any records of existing.
Being big has its own issues. The blue whale needs to eat around 3.6 tons of krill each day to maintain its need of 1.5 million Calories per day. Comparing this the 2,500 Calories needed by a human seems like almost nothing.
Most of the time when we think about big animals dinosaurs come to our mind, but these animals had a huge range of sizes, from the smallest ones with the same size as a chicken and biggest ones close to the blue whale size.
The interesting topic comes when you start classifying animals and looking for the biggest ones of each category, which I want to share with you here.
If we look at the list of the biggest animals existing right now the list is reigned by only whales, so the biggest meat eater existing is the sperm whale, while here there’s a little of controversy since if we are being really strict about what’s a meat eater then the blue whale is the winner, since krill is considered an animal, but since the sperm whale fights against giant squids and eat fishes, let’s give them this trophy. The sperm whale has a length of approximately 16 meters, being the males the longest ones, and it can weight up to 41 tons.
But as you can see I didn’t say the sperm whale is the biggest meat eater ever, because that title is held by an extinct animal. The megalodon is an extinct shark that was probably the biggest depredator that ever existed, with a length of 18 meters in average, or at least that’s what the fossil records show us.
The biggest fish existing right now is the whale shark, with its 12.65 meters there’s no other fish that can compare to them. The megalodon is probably the biggest fish that ever existed.
The ocean has made something clear, the biggest animals live in it, there’s no doubt about it. But enough of aquatic animals, let’s move to land.
The answer for the biggest land animal is easy, most of us have seen one. The African elephant is the biggest land animal, weighting 3 tons it’s impossible to match their size. But here’s where things get tricky because giraffes are the tallest land animals, we all know that, but their weight of just 1 ton is not enough to win over the elephant on this category.
The polar bear is considered to be the largest living land meat eater in the world, but once again numbers get a little tricky, because crocodiles who are the biggest reptiles living right now can be heavier and longer, but still they are not considered as the biggest ones. The biggest bird existing right now is the ostrich, which can weight up to 140 kg.
If we move to extinct animals then we have that arguably the barosaurus has been the biggest land animal, reaching more than 25 meters according to the data we have available now, but some paleontologists argue that it might have reached 50 meters, but this is not considered as something proved.
The biggest meat eater animal ever was the spinosaurus with a range between 12–18 meters it was bigger that the popular T-Rex, which is considered as one of the biggest meat eaters as well.
The biggest land mammal that ever existed is still from the elephants family, the Asian straight-tusked elephant had an estimated size of 5 meters and probably 22 tons, beating the African elephant.
While drawing the line between the biggest dinosaurs and the biggest birds is complicated, the elephant bird was the largest one that ever existed, reaching more than 3 meters of height. The Sarcosuchus was probably the biggest reptile ever, with its almost 12 meters of length.
While the so called mega fauna is already extinct, it’s interesting to know which where the biggest animals that walked on earth, and it’s amazing to be able to share our time in this planet with the biggest one ever. The human, even when it has been one of the most successful, is really far to be part of this list, but we are the ones able to make this kind of classifications and that’s also worth something.
This story is part of my 31/31 challenge. Following a friend’s idea I will publish at least one story every day for the next month.
If you see any error please let me know, the idea is to stop over-reviewing my stories before publishing them.
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