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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

Still seems magical to me that the largest animals ever to live on this planet are alive today (or maybe 200 years ago would have been a better time to be a whale, before hunting too many of their largest).

Interesting that this creature isn't actually larger, but could be heavier due to its bone structure.

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A small caveat. Largest that we know of. Most animals don't make good fossils, it's actually rare for an animal to get in the right spot at the right time to fossilize, and then we have to find it. Which effectively mean that it has to be on land, preferably empty area, close to surface.

This effectively means that we mostly get fossils from species that very relatively abundant, lived in what is today North America, Australia, Europe, China or more recently, richer parts of South America. Because finding fossils without funding is difficult.

There are obviously exceptions.

Well, we don't just base the hypothesis that blue whales are the largest animal even on their size relative to estimated size of extinct species in general. It's based on the phylogeny of quite a few extinct and extant whale species and other allometric and paleo-bio/ecological considerations that go into a model of a recent diversification of larger whales that has thus far culminated in the blue whale [1]. It doesn't appear individual species of whale were evolving gigantism really rapidly and out of nowhere from smaller species, but a gradual trend over tens of millions of years. It appears missing fossils that are extreme size outliers probably become less likely the further you go back in time from the past few million years.

> Because finding fossils without funding is difficult

Eh, not really. They don't occur in isolation typically, a formation/deposit or Lagerstätten [2] rich in fossils are accidentally discovered, word gets out at some point, and then international funding follows.

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerst%C3%A4tte

IIRC the blue whale is larger than all possible (reasonable) land animals, so the only possible competition would be another ocean animal of some sort.

Well it would need to be on land today and close to the surface. It could have been anywhere at the time of death.

Yeah, it's mind blowing. Minor correction, however. It's indeed the weight that counts usually. When we say blue whales are the largest, we mean heaviest. Largest in terms of size would probably be the Argeninosaurs or some other sauropods.

Probably, yep. Longer individual animal alive is a marine invertebrate arranged as a fine thread, If I remember correctly. But trees can easily triple that size, of course.

>or maybe 200 years ago would have been a better time to be a whale

The 19th century is not particularly known for its kind and ethical treatment of whales

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