The blue whale is renowned as the Earth’s largest animal, taking that title today by quite some distance. That holds true even stretching back through time as these enormous marine mammals are even bigger than some of the largest of the dinosaurs.
How Big Is a Blue Whale?
The largest blue whale ever found stretched 33 meters (108 feet) and was caught by whalers in the early 1900s. Usually, however, they can range between 24 and 30 meters (78-98 feet) in length, depending on where they live. Some of the largest reside in the Antarctic.
Their mouths are so large they can gulp down as much as 80,000 liters (~21,000 gallons) of water in one go. To pump blood around their massive bodies, blue whales also have a massive heart that is 1.5 meters wide by 1.5 meters high (5 feet wide and 5 feet high), weighing around 1360 kilograms (~3000 pounds). When it comes to their flippers, however, blue whales’ are relatively short for their body size at around 3 to 4 meters (9 to 13 feet) in length. The humpback whale, for instance, has flippers that are around five meters long, or nearly a third of their body length.
