Question: What is the biggest creature to ever exist ?

Oli Wilson answered on 15 Nov 2017:

Ooh, I love this question…
If we’re talking animals, the answer is the blue whale! It’s amazing that we’re living at the same time as the largest animal ever – we should make sure we look after it well… There’s a great skeleton of one in London’s Natural History Museum, so go and have a look at it if you can!

Other, potentially even better, contenders from outside the animal kingdom include:
– General Sherman the Giant Sequoia in California, which weighs 2100 tonnes, more than ten times as much as the biggest blue whales (and bigger examples of this species used to exist – one, called the Mother of the Forest, was killed in the 1850s to show people how awesome it was. Just the bark from just one third of the tree weighed 60 tonnes and was almost half a metre thick at the base).
– A tree called Pando in Utah, which is 40,000 genetically identical tree trunks sharing one massive root system. This huge, weird clone is about 80,000 years old (though could even be a million) and weighs about 6,000 tonnes, making it the heaviest organism in the world.
– A honey fungus in Oregon which stretches across an area 2.4 miles wide, covering a total area 20 times larger than Pando. It’s a clone too, but it’s at least ten times younger than Pando.

These things are all amazing, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if bigger things have existed in the past – and the fact that three of these giants are in the USA makes me wonder whether similar things still exist in secret elsewhere in the world. But Pando is dying, General Sherman and the Giant Sequoias are endangered because of logging and humans using fire wrong, and hunting nearly drove the blue whales extinct. If other giants are still surviving, we might have to be lucky to catch them…