These are the Largest Creatures that Ever Existed

throughout the hundreds of millions of years of life evolving on our little blue planet there have been some absolutely monstrous creatures that have sprung up from time to time some of them lived in the distant past visible to us only through interpretations of the fossil record While others live right alongside us to this present day and in today's video we're going to explore the largest animals that have ever graced the surface of our planet including the most massive of dinosaurs and whales enormous flying reptiles and ancient Scorpions so large you'll be grateful that they are extinct [Music] the ocean has long been home to some of the world's largest animals after all the buoyancy of water means that an animal can expend less energy supporting a much higher weight than it would on land a few million years ago the group of aquatic mammals known as Bine whales began swelling in size this surge in weight is believed to have coincided with the cooling of the earth's climate and a subsequent increase in Plankton and krill density along ocean currents these dense concentrations of nutrition were often separated by long distances meaning larger whales with more fat reserves were more likely to survive the long trips and evolutionary pressure which continued to increase their size over many generations the shifting size also happen to coincide with the extinction of the ocean's apex predator at the time the Megalodon adding to the theories that long-distance travel and fat reserves were now more important than speed as a result of all of this ban whales became the largest animals on the planet title or which they hold to this day king among them is the blue whale it's pretty common knowledge that the blue whale is the largest animal on the planet and likely the largest in history but a some perspective is needed to truly understand just how colossal they are the international wailing Commissioners recorded 88 individual whales longer than 30 m or 98 ft if you're curious that makes it longer than six Toyota Corollas placed in a row front to back as for weight the maximum estimate reaches about 200 tons making it about as heavy as 30 fully grown African elephants which are the largest animal on land today its heart is about the size and weight of a piano with tubes large enough for a child to crawl through and its heart rate can drop to just two beats per minute to conserve oxygen at significant depths but perhaps its most shocking Dimension can be found in its immense mouth just opening and closing this mouth to feed Burns about 1,900 calories and it opens so wide that another blue whale could swim right into it in a single gulp they can consume nearly half a million calories worth of krill as with many Giants of the ocean blue whales also live a relatively long life by measuring layers of ear wax whales age can be determined with surprising accuracy and the oldest ever recorded was 110 years [Music] old leaving the ocean behind animals on land have generally had a tougher time getting to huge sizes throughout history however there have been some notable exceptions to this all of which were dinosaurs it's no secret that some dinosaurs were massive but to understand their truly immense scale we need to put things into some perspective but first of all which of the dinosaurs was the largest or the heaviest is a question that doesn't exactly have one single answer the big issue with fossil interpretation is that often paleontologists are working with incomplete skeletal remains and have to perform for lack of a better term a bit of educated guess workk to fill in the blanks or species and a subsequent lack of consensus in the scientific community that said what we are confident in is that the largest dinosaurs were all sorop pods the iic herbivores with the long necks and the huge tails the largest complete sorod skeleton that we've ever uncovered belonged to the species gapan and it weighs around 30 tons this is already a few times heavier than anything working on land in our day and age but it's far from the largest creature to stomp around during the Jurassic for example there's the argosaurus which is believed to have reached upward of 100 tons it's generally regarded as the largest confirmed Sor report but even this giant may have been dwarfed by another creature this is the Braska saurus potentially the largest animal to not just walk on land but if the upper estimates are to be believed the largest animal to have ever lived on planet Earth the first specimen was discovered in the late 1970s in Southern India and immediately the researchers were blown away by its M size it wasn't a complete skeleton but the fossilized remains included Bones from the hips legs forearms and vertebrae even compared to other Sor Parts these bones were massive a shin bone for instance was 2 m long nearly 30% larg larger than the shin of Argentinosaurus similar increases in size were seen with the FEMA fragments and the vertebrae scaling these proportional differences out to the entire body and she ends up with a dinosaur of unparalleled colossal size but estimate in 2001 put its maximum weight at 220 tons which would make it the heaviest animal of all time in the two decades since then a number of other wildly varying estimates have been put forward usually depending on which sorod the bones are compared with one group of researchers concluded that the shin bone was actually a deteriorating femur dropping the weight estimate to a mere 50 tons most recently a 2023 review suggested that its maximum weight was probably around 170 tons falling a bit short of the largest animal of all time but still possibly taking the crown as the largest and heaviest animal to walk on [Music] land unsurprisingly it's another animal from the age of the dinosaurs that takes the spot as the largest creature to ever take flight terrosaur were a family of flying reptiles close cousins of dinosaurs that lived between 65 and 230 million years ago it's believed that they were the first vertebrates to develop flight and they quickly came to dominate the skies and with little competition up in the clouds some species evolved to be incredibly large the largest terrasaur was qu Lotus named after one of the major gods of the Aztec Pantheon the first bones of this Beast were found in Texas in the early 1970s but soon after several more fossilized remains were located including a nearly complete one putting it on the fast track to officially being classified as its own species thanks to so many remains being Unearthed its size is pretty well agreed on in the world of paleontology it likely had a maximum weight of 550b or 250 kilos this isn't terribly heavy compared to anything that we've talked about previously today but remember this thing could fly the real shocker comes when you look at its wingspan which was an incredible 36 ft that's 11 M with its wings fully extended in flight and its long beak pointed forward this would hilariously make it about the same size as a locked Martin F35 but perhaps even more terrifying than its huge silhouette in the sky would be its formidable size o when standing on the ground based on the structure of its hands and arms it's believed that this creature could commonly stand on all fours when on the ground and would have towered over any human alive today with a standing shoulder height of around 10 ft or 3 m but for all we know about its size we aren't actually sure what this giant like to eat the obvious visual similarities to Modern birds like the Pelican had early researchers believing that its Dart was mainly comprised of fish however more recent investigations have found that any form of Fish Feeding such as skimming the water during low flights would expend far too much energy from an animal of this size and wouldn't be worth the caloric cost not to mention many of the fossilized remains have been hundreds of miles away from any ancient Lake beds or Seas which doesn't line up with a proposed Seafood diet one modern Theory posits that instead of fish these creatures ate smaller animals on land hunting the smaller types of dinosaur babies and eating eggs out of their nests would have been easy pickings and they could leap into the air and flap their massive Wings to quickly Escape any potential danger that could come from standing on Solid Ground for too long while it wasn't technically a bird its wings and feathery appearance might have you wondering what the largest bird in history was and that award belongs to a type of flightless bird known as a greater elephant Birds when they were still around greater elephant birds were a forc to be reckoned with on their home Island Madagascar resembling an ostrich or imun appearance they towered over the landscape with a standing height rivaling the quel hotas and had a maximum weight of around 2,000 or about 00 kilos these are by far the largest birds in all of history but what sets them apart from many of the other extinct creatures that we've covered so far is that their species didn't come to an end hundreds of millions of years ago it's believed that they didn't go extinct until surprisingly recently in a thousand ad and probably as a result of extensive hunting by none other than us human [Music] beings and for our final section today we're going to venture away from the animals that hold records for the largest heaviest and instead take a look at the long extinct creepy Critters that will certainly make your skin craw fortunately for all of us alive today insects and arachnids are quite small compared to us sure a few of them may be venomous but it's nothing you can't out run or stomp on with a good thick shoe travel back 300 million years however and the odds are going to be far less in your favor the Carboniferous was a period in Earth's distant past long before even dinosaurs had evolved one notable thing about this time was that it was when terrestrial plant life really took off with primitive trees and bushes sprouting up and covering the landscape in Lush foliage this explosion of plant life had the side effect of pumping tons of oxygen into the air putting the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere up to about 30% at its peak that's 10% higher than it is today insects don't have lungs like the rest of us they intake air instead through special tubes on their skin because of this Anatomy that's lack of large Predators an increased amount of oxygen meant that insects could sustain larger and larger sizes for instance take Mega optia commonly known as Griffin flies essentially these were giant dragon flies with wingspans of about 28 in or 71 CM this makes them 10 to 15 times larger than dragon flies today since they were likely Predators like their descendants one can only imagine the size of their prey and just how fast they could fly on the grounds there were even more monstrosities perhaps the most horrifying of these was the arthop plura a giant ancestor of millipedes these things grew up to a maximum length of 8 ft and 2 in or about 2.5 M and were about as wide as a human being these are the largest known landed vertebrates of all time and were actually quite confident in their size thanks to extensive fossilized remains tracks they left behind and even exoskeletons that they shed along with these there were giant cockroaches several times the size of anything seen today huge mayflies and one of the largest scorpions to ever live which reached a staggering length of 27 in or 68 cm the ends of the carboneros period saw the oxygen levels drop back to where they are today this along with a growing number of predators saw the size of insect rapidly decreased to the sizes that they would remain at until today [Music]

Channel: Sideprojects

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Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, sideprojects, largest shark, largest fish, largest animal size comparison, size comparison, animal size comparison, dinosaurs, blue whale size comparison, dinosaur, meg size, kraken size

Id: PmzQHnQ-njE

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2024