If there's an overall lesson to be gleaned from the prehistoric bestiaries of our childhood libraries, it's this: If you want to go extreme, go prehistoric. If you're curious about, say, the ...

When we say these shoals are huge, we really do mean huge – they can stretch more than 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) long, 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) wide, and 30 meters (98 feet) deep. Combined ...

What is the largest size an animal can be? Mike Follows Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK. It is usually claimed that the blue whale is the biggest animal that has ever lived on Earth.

There was cheering and shouting far off shore on July 4 when a local whale watch boat enjoyed a rare sighting of the largest animal on the planet — a blue whale. Excitement ran through the boat ...

Scientists have sequenced the largest known animal genome — and it's 30 times bigger than the human genome. The genome belongs to the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa), a primeval ...

Until now, the largest-known animal genome was that of another lungfish, the Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri. The South American lungfish's genome was more than twice as big.

Hunted nearly to extinction during 20th century whaling, the Antarctic blue whale, the world's largest animal, went from a population size of roughly 200,000 to little more than 300. The most ...