Latest Largest organisms Stories

Pensoft Publishers Cockroaches (Blattodea) are an insect order remarkable in their biodiversity and distribution, with more than 4500 species known and great geographical reach. Cockroach fossils date back around 400 million years, which testifies to their great adaptability and endurance that puts them among the planet's great survivors. The cockroach genus Pseudophoraspism has has been reported from China for the first time thanks to the discovery of three new species: Pseudophoraspis...

Dinosaurs, some of the largest creatures to have ever walked the earth, have for the first time been accurately weighed by scientists using a new technique, and the results indicate that we have been guilty of wrongly portraying them as massively heavy beasts. Biologists at the University of Manchester, using lasers to calculate body mass, measured the minimum amount of skin that would be required to contain the skeletal structure of modern-day mammals, including reindeer, polar bears, and...

Somewhere out there in the ocean, SpongeBob SquarePants has a teeny-tiny cousin and a humongous uncle.That's just what one would expect from a new analysis of body sizes across all orders of animal life that was conducted by researchers at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), in Durham, N.C. and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.Researchers Craig McClain and Alison Boyer created a giant database on body sizes across all orders of animal life and found that phyla...

By SUE VORENBERG Scientists hope to gain insight into fossil record by studying current size ranges By Sue Vorenberg The New Mexican Some would say it's impossible to draw a picture of something when you can only see 2 percent of it. With that little information, you might just see a little color, or an edge, or a blue chunk of sky in the background. But impossible or not, that's very much like the picture paleontologists have to work with when they try to rebuild the planet's distant...

Researchers at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa reported the eye size of the world's largest squid, adding that they may be the largest animal eyes ever discovered.With a diameter larger than a football, the eyes measure about 11 inches across, but could have been even larger when the colossal squid was still alive."These are truly amazing eyes," said Eric Warrant, an expert on animal vision from the University of Lund in Sweden."In the collapsed state we see here, they...