THE LARGEST CREATURE EVER ON PLANET EARTH

Yesterday, the spotlight was on crocodiles, and Lolong was 20 feet 3 inches long.  But the largest croc ever was Sarcosuchus imperator, who 110 million years ago grew to 40 feet and weighed 17,500 pounds.

Anyway, if you keep up with such esoterica as the largest creature to have ever lived, you should know that the Blue Whale is it.

Diplodocus, from around 150 million years ago, while perhaps up to 108 feet long, only weighed 34,000 pounds.  According to Wikipedia:

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the baleen whale parvorder, Mysticeti.^[5] At up to 29.9 metres (98 ft)^[6] in length and with a maximum recorded weight of 173 tonnes(190 short tons),^[6] it is the largest animal known to have ever existed.^[7][8]

The weight is, thus, 380,000 pounds, or more than ten times heavier than the previous largest dinosaur.  Blue whales numbered close to a quarter million, dropped to 10,000 or so in 2002, but, with protection, appears now to be up to as many as 25,000.

Jurassic Park/World showed a variety of dinosaurs:

I remember as a child making Brontosaurus models out of plaster of Paris.  The term Diploducus was alien to me.  A complete Diploducus, though, was discovered in Wyoming, and has been displayed in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Natural Museum since 1907.

In 1989 a rancher in Argentina found a gigantic vertebra about the size of a man.  Further studies determined a beast living almost a hundred million years ago.  Named Argentinosaurus huinculensis, it is estimated to weigh up to 212,000 pounds, reaching as long as 130 feet in length.  A case can thus be made that this titanosaur is the longest creature, as shown in red below relative to other giant sauropod dinosaurs:

However, the Blue Whale is almost twice as heavy, so still retains its crown as the largest.

There is no Blue Whale in captivity.  You can best see them off California (Monterey Bay and San Diego in the summer), Baja (Mexico) and Pico Island (Azores) in the late winter/early spring, and Iceland and St. Laurence Marine Park (Quebec) in the summer.

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