I remember one day many years ago just snapping wondering what had been the the biggest animal to ever exist on earth, and after a few searches it seems like the consensus was *NOT* a dinosaur but the Blue Whale which still exists today, still think about it from time to time. The article only discusses land animals but I wonder if the blue whale still reigns after more modern discoveries.
We can't say with certainty that the blue whale is the largest animal ever, but to our knowledge at most there were several other species approximately the same size. And even those are based on estimates with rather huge ranges.
I read a book to my kid regularly that says that fact about blue whales too and I always kind of think it seems odd that it would be the biggest given the whole dinosaur thing in the past.
The ice age made water animals grow a lot since ice helps concentrate plankton. Earth is cooler today than at almost any other point in history, so makes sense we see bigger water animals today than historically. The ice age did the opposite for land animals, so we have smaller land animals than in history as well.
It’s vastly easier to be big in water than on the ground as a result of the square–cube law. Indeed it kind of boggles the mind how these gigantic dinosaurs were even able to stand, much less move around.
Sauropods were light for their size, the air sacs definitely did a lot of work, though so did much of the size being neck and tail.
Argentinosaurus is estimated to have reached 35 metres and 80 tonnes at the upper range, for comparison blue whales top out at 30 meters and 200 tonnes.
You can see something similar with giraffes, though without the benefit of tail (or air sacs). Male giraffes average above 5m tall (tallest known was 5.8m — 19ft) compared to a bush elephant's 3.2 (4 at the absolute limit), but the average male giraffe is just 1200kg versus 6000 for elephants.
Obviously Sauropods were still bonkers heavy, to a ridiculous degree for land animals.
Yes, I’m surprised that in a time those creatures existed on land something much larger didn’t existed at sea. My rudimentary knowledge of the past was that dinosaurs weren’t some anomaly, everything was large back then.
Yet. Our current reality is the largest land animal is oversized by 30x by the blue whale.
I wonder how much algae and plankton a blue whale ends up eating accidentally, and how much of its caloric intake that would represent. It has to be non-zero… but how non-zero I’m unsure.
