Talk:Largest organisms

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A fact from Largest organisms appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 23 August 2005. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the largest organism in the world is a honey fungus which covers more than 3.4 square miles (8.9 km²) and is thousands of years old?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2005/August.

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largest reptile?

Pythons have been known to reach 20+ feet (record is something like 23 feet). That certainly deserves at least a mention...

Does anyone know what the scientific consensus is?

~ One the record length for a python is just a little over 32 feet and about 350 pounds although some sources such as books made by the Smithsonian museum say they can weigh 400 pounds.

 Two the largest crocodile measured 23 feet long and weighed 3,000 pounds.

Flying Things

Added a bit about the largest birds that could fly, even if they're extinct. Having the largest bird alive today that can fly would be good.

Cymbospondylus was not the largest ichthyosaur

Cymbospondylus reached only lengths of about 10m, but Shonisaurus was about 15m, but there were even much larger ichthyosaurs, a recent find from Canada belonged to a 23m long ichthyosaur and isolated vertebras were found which belonged to ichthyosaurs of nearly 30m.

Many big-fish-stories and mistakes

I´ve seen that many of the "records" in the list of the biggest fishes are only big-fish-stories, many of them already easy to identify by completely false dimensions. There are false sizes of the wels catfish, the beluga sturgeon, the Arapaima, the giant morray (which is in fact heavier) and some more. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.224.119.207 (talk • contribs)

Pig

I have removed this section:

Pig. The world record for the heaviest pig so far is held by Big Bill, owned by Elias Buford Butler of Jackson, Tennessee. It was a Poland China breed of hog that tipped the scales at 2,552 lb. (1,157 kg.) in 1933.^[1] Bill was due to be exhibited at the Chicago World Fair when he broke a leg and had to be put down. At about this point in time, the trend in hog production began to shift to hogs that were much trimmer and very lean. ^[2] For other pigs of notable size see List of pigs over 1000 pounds.

I did this because a pig is part of the order Artiodactyla & even the "monster hogs" are smaller than, say, a Hippo, Giraffe or a even a large bovid. Perhaps some of this pig text could be incorporated into the Artiodactyla section.

Largest wingspan?

The Andean Condor's wingspan to 320 centimetres (10.5 ft).^[3]

Reference

^ Times Online: Boy, 11, shoots biggest hog in the backwoods
^ Alberta Pork: This Business of Pork Production
^ Bryce-Trainor, Matty (2001). Raptors of the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-12762-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Saint Helena giant earwig

A possibility that this may have to be removed/rewritten as the insect in question was declared extinct back in 2014 (https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/11073/21425735). Someone with more insect knowledge than me would have to work out what the new biggest is.

[1] Times Online: Boy, 11, shoots biggest hog in the backwoods

[2] Alberta Pork: This Business of Pork Production

[Ferguson-Lees-3] Bryce-Trainor, Matty (2001). Raptors of the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-12762-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

[1]

[2]

[3]