Top Ten Big Animals – Elephant Bath
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Top Ten Big Animals-Elephant cooling off
Large animals in the animal kingdom have both advantages and disadvantages, this depends on a variety of factors. For example large animals do much better in cold climates as they have less surface area so they retain heat better.
Large animals also have fewer enemies as they are able to fend of predators much more easily.
The square-cube law is a principle that says as a shape gets bigger the volume of the shape gets bigger faster than the area of the shape. This is called allometric scaling.
This explains why large animals like our elephant need extra cooling, as cooling needs surface area to work efficiently.
It was J. B. S. Haldane who pointed out that large animals do not look like smaller animals because as the animals get lager they have to have bones that are strong enough and larger enough to carry their increased weight. As a result of this there is a limit to how big an animal can grow.
This can be altered if some of the weight is effectively reduced by the buoyancy of water, the largest carnivorous dinosaur Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was able to be the size it was as a result of it inhabiting the edge of lakes and river.
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Top Ten Big Animals – Giraffe Sunset
Sunset always seems to bring a different dimension to Africa, here is a collection of the worlds tallest mammals looking like sculptures on the horizon.
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Top Ten Big Animals – Bear and Wolf
Amazing photograph really, both are major carnivores and yet they are completely unbothered by the presence of the other.
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Top Ten Big Animals – Blue Whale
The worlds largest mammal the Blue Whale, it is now endangered but it is hard to believe that in 1931 30,000 blue whale were killed for the whale oil they could produce by rendering.
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Squid
In late 2006, scientists with Japan’s National Science Museum caught a live giant squid. The cephalopod was 24-foot (7-meter) long, you can see in the photograph the squid bait.
This isn’t the only type of squid as there is also the colossal squid. Both types have massive eyes the largest of all the animals being 10 inches (25 cm) in diameter, they are essential for the squid to gather every last photo available in the dark and dinghy depths of the ocean.
Squid species of all sizes, have eight arms and two longer feeding tentacles that draw food to their beak-like mouths. They live on fish, shrimp, and of course other squid, Sucker marks have been found on some whales that might lead us to think that they even attack whales!
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Giant Clam
Large Giant Clam (Tridacna maxima) with blue lips and a grey shell. Brain coral and other hard corals are visible in the background.
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Giant Rabbit
Weighing an impressive 50 pounds, this huge rabbit is more than 3 feet long. It has a massive diet eating cabbage, corn on the cob, broccoli, fruit of all type he particularly likes apples. Bread and crackers are also apples, bread, crackers.
All of this is not cheap and keeping him happy costs £50-60 a day. It runs in the family, Ralph’s mother and father were both previous record holders.
Ralph lives in East Sussex, England, where, apparently, giant bunny genes rule.
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Largest Carnivorous Dinosaur
Spinosaurus which means “spine lizard, or thorn lizard”, is tnow accepted as the largest predatory dinosaur. Previously thought to be Tyrannosaurus Rex and later Gigantosaurus, “Spinny” measured 55 feet (17 meters) from head to tail. Weight was approximately 12 tons!
Spinosaurus lived in 95 million years ago in the cretaceous period in Egypt in northern Africa.
Spinosaurus was discovered in 1912 by German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer in Egypt. This original specimen was destroyed during the second world war though detailed records remain.
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Largest Eagle
The Harpy eagle lives in tropical lowland rainforests in the canopy layer. Its natural habitat has meant that it has disappeared from many parts of Central America
They can weight between 6-9 kg sometimes 10kg and have immensely strong talons. They are known to take howler monkeys from trees and even live sloths of their own body weight.
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