![]() But even that figure is shrouded in some suspicion. This was at an Antarctic whaling station where the animal was said to measure 98 feet. The first is a measurement dating back to 1937. That said, there are two references in scientific papers of blue whales that are near 100 feet. Google it.īut here’s the problem: not a single blue whale has ever been scientifically verified as being 100 feet long. The number of legitimate science books, articles, Web sites and even esteemed science journals that quote this number is in the thousands. And, as many articles and references about blue whales will tell you, blue whales can reach lengths of up to 100 feet long or more. However, estimates for the top size of blue whales go up to 200 tons. Dreadnoughtus was said to reach lengths of about 85 feet with an estimated mass of about 65 tons. The fossils for Dreadnoughtus contained 115 bones, representing roughly 70 percent of the dinosaur’s skeleton behind its head. Argentinosaurus: Nobu TamuraĪnother contender for the world’s largest dinosaur is Dreadnoughtus, and in this case, the fossil record is a bit more informative. ![]() The Natural History Museum in London suggests the animal may have been as long as 115 feet. Scientists estimate that the Argentinosaurus probably weighed somewhere around 70-80 tons, maybe reaching as much as 90 tons. We can only speculate about the actual size of Argentinosaurus since all that we know comes from just 13 bones. Titanosaurs were long-necked sauropods, four-legged, herbivorous animals that often grew to extraordinary sizes. The Argentinosaurus lived about 100 million to 93 million years ago during the Cretaceous period in what is now Argentina and is part of a group of dinosaurs known as titanosaurs. The largest dinosaur that we’ve ever found fossils for is the Argentinosaurus. That’s true (so far as we know) if by size we mean weight. The blue whale is frequently cited as the largest animal to have ever lived. ![]() So let’s talk for a minute about size because there are some misconceptions out there about how big these animals can get. The second paper looked at the blue whale’s size, and attempted to quantify how whales got so big and, well, why they are not bigger. ![]() That figure was about 30 to 50 percent lower than predicted, said the researchers. The first paper recorded a leviathan’s heartbeat at great depths in Monterey Bay, revealing the somewhat astonishing fact that the whales’ heart rate slows significantly the deeper they go, reaching an average minimum of about four to eight beats per minute, with a low of two beats per minute. Many swim so close to shore that a lucrative whale watching industry has emerged in places like Southern California, where numerous fishing vessels have been converted into whale watching ships.īlue whales were in the news recently with the publication of two papers by Stanford’s Jeremy Goldbogen at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California. One of those groups, the largest in the world, is called the Eastern North Pacific population, consists of some 2,000 animals and makes an annual migration from the warm waters of Baja California to Alaska and back every year. The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that there are probably between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales worldwide today, divided among some five separate populations or groups. 360,000 were killed in the Antarctic alone. Hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th and 19th centuries, the blue whale has staged a hopeful recovery in the last five decades, since commercial whaling was outlawed by the international community in 1966 (although some Soviet whale hunting continued into the early 1970s).īefore commercial whaling began, it is estimated that there were some 400,000 blue whales on earth. The blue whale ( Balaenoptera musculus) is a truly magnificent creature.
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