Animal Sizes

[Supercommunist]

Back on the topic of black caimans they really do appear light for their size.

In this video, a 337 cm black caiman weighed 125 kilos or 275 pounds and one of the men claimed that the largest caiman he caught was a 12 footer that weighed around 400 pounds.

[Ceratodromeus]

Depending on the sex of the animal that broadly overlaps with the american alligator.

[Infinity Blade]

Wrangel Island woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius)

The woolly mammoths that lived on Wrangel Island are often claimed to be dwarf individuals. A look at the Wikipedia page for the entire species would indicate that this is false. So how big (or not) were the Wrangel Island woolly mammoths?

Long bone measurements (in length) of seven different Wrangel Island mammoth individuals are provided by Vartanyan et al. (2008).[1] They are as follows:

• Femur: 1010 mm
• Femur: 970 mm
• Tibia: 430 mm
• Tibia: 456 mm
• Tibia: 430 mm
• Tibia: 490 mm
• Tibia: 490 mm

To put this into perspective, adult woolly mammoth femora and tibiae from Sevsk measure 830-1010 mm and 460-555 mm, respectively. Femora and tibiae from Berelekh, Siberia measure 850-1130 mm and 470-570 mm, respectively. The largest mammoth from Sevsk has an identical femur length to the first individual in the list above (1010 mm) and has been estimated to have had a height of ~215-220 cm.[1]

If so, then we can deduce body mass by isometrically scaling down from larger woolly mammoth individuals. A male woolly mammoth specimen from the Taymyr Peninsula (Siberia) with a femur length of 1055 mm was estimated to have a shoulder height of 267 cm and a body mass of 3,900 kg.[2] Isometrically scaling down to a height of 215-220 cm results in an animal weighing ~2,036-2,182 kg. The five tibiae listed above average 459.2 mm in length, corresponding to a femur length of ~830 mm (slightly less), so such an animal would have weighed even less than a ~2 tonne mammoth with a >1 meter femur.

As can be seen, while the Wrangel Island woolly mammoths were not particularly large for their species, nor can they be considered dwarves.[1] Indeed, small woolly mammoth individuals were present across the entire geographic distribution of the species, and were not limited to Wrangel Island or the very late Pleistocene/Holocene.[3]

References:

[1] Vartanyan, S., Arslanov, K.A., Karhu, J., Possnert, G., & Sulerzhitsky, L. (2008). Collection of radiocarbon dates on the mammoths ( Mammuthus primigenius) and other genera of Wrangel Island, northeast Siberia, Russia. Quaternary Research, 70, 51-59.
[2] Larramendi, A. 2016. Shoulder height, body mass, and shape of proboscideans. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 61 (3): 537–574.
[3] Ouden, N.D., Reumer, J., & Ostende, L.V. (2012). Did mammoth end up a lilliput? Temporal body size trends in Late Pleistocene Mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach, 1799) inferred from dental data. Quaternary International, 255, 53-58.

(Please check my work. I'm especially skeptical of the supposed shoulder height of ~215-220 cm for the individual with a 1010 mm femur. That isn't much smaller than a 2.67 meter individual with a femur of 1055 mm.)

[Supercommunist]

I know the giant Tropeognathus in WWD's is not accurate and that it is difficult to determine how heavy a pterosaur is since we have no real modern analog but anyone have a ball park estimate how much the fake giant would have weighed and how much a more realistic 8 meter wingspan animal would have weighed?

[Infinity Blade]

For what it's worth, the holotype specimen was estimated to weigh 22.94 kg based off of stylopodial diameters (Pêgas et al., 2021). And the holotype is not the largest specimen. Specimen MN 6594-V (estimated maximized wingspan of 8.7 meters) was estimated to have a skull ~55% longer than the holotype's (Kellner et al., 2013). If you assume skull length would scale isometrically, you'd be looking at an animal weighing 86 kg*.

If you isometrically scale this 86 kg animal with an 8.7 meter wingspan up to one with a 12 meter wingspan (as in WWD), you'd get an animal weighing ~226 kg**. Which I think sounds about right for most pterosaurs at that wingspan.




*((Skull length of 979 mm/skull length of 630 mm)³)*22.94 kg)=86.08 kg. I double checked by scaling using wingspan instead of skull length (a wingspan of 8.7 meters is ~55% wider than a wingspan of 5.6 meters), and I got pretty much the same results, so I think this is correct.

**((Wingspan of 12 meters/wingspan of 8.7 meters)³)*86 kg)=225.67 kg

[roninwolf1981]

Sept 20, 2020 20:11:30 GMT 5 Ceratodromeus said:

A 12ft 1in(3.68m) alligator from the Mississippi river, found to have grown at a significant rate since it was first tagged in 2011; fueled by introduced asian carp heavy diet 

Not gonna lie, that's making me hungry for some fried alligator.

[shadi]

Is there any data on the average head-body length of African bush elephants, excluding the trunk? The only figures I can find all incorporate the trunk's length, which is a bit annoying.

[spartan]

Oct 24, 2019 15:56:59 GMT 5 theropod said:

Triceratops/Eotriceratops (maximum size)

...

Do we know how the specimen "Big John" compares to these estimates?

[Infinity Blade]

I had to look up Big John. Its skull is reportedly 2.62 meters long (also, unrelated, but it's interesting that its frill apparently has a pathological hole, possibly from another Trike).

www.timeslive.co.za/news/sci-tech/2021-09-06-watch-big-bucks-expected-for-big-john-as-triceratops-skeleton-to-go-under-the-hammer/

[Supercommunist]

Brown bear









Lion

[Supercommunist]

Some boar sizes:

[Supercommunist]

Python weights are surprisingly hard to come by.

A postmortem experience of Indian rock python(Python molurus molurus) that swallowed a whole barking deer

www.veterinaryworld.org/Vol.6/March%20-%202013/A%20postmortem%20experience%20of%20Indian%20rock%20python%20that%20swallowed%20a%20whole%20barking%20deer.pdf

The total length of this female Indian Rock was 406 cm (13.32 feet) and approximate weight of 60 kg (including a whole deer that was
swallowed by the python)

. A typical adult Indian python weighs between 70-120
pounds (32-55 kg).

[Infinity Blade]

Sunfish

It is often claimed that the largest extant bony fish is the ocean sunfish (Mola mola). A female specimen 272 cm in total length and weighing in at 2,300 kg was previously (read further for more recent information) thought to be the world's heaviest bony fish. However, while the the measurement is completely valid (the weight was recorded, not estimated), the classification of the specimen in question was recently rectified in a 2018 study. The bodily features of the specimen in question are actually characteristic of the southern sunfish (Mola alexandrini), not M. mola (Sawai et al., 2018).

Although the scientifc name of this species has been accepted as M. ramsayi based on Fraser-Brunner (1951), M. alexandrini was used as a valid name by others (e.g. Barnard 1935, 1947, 1948; Smith 1950, 1965). Therefore, we conclude that M. alexandrini is a valid species according to Article 23.9.1.1 of ICZN (1999). Moreover, to date, the maximum recorded (not estimated) weight of M. alexandrini is 2,300 kg for a 272 cm TL female caught by set net of the coast of Kamogawa, Japan, on 16 August 1996 (Roach 2003; Nakatsubo et al. 2007b; Pope et al. 2010; Sawai 2017). This specimen, which is currently regarded as the world’s heaviest bony fish specimen, was previously identifed as M. mola (Roach 2003; Pope et al. 2010). Here, we re-identify it as M. alexandrini—from the head bump, chin bump, and rounded clavus (see also Nakatsubo et al. 2007b: table 2; Soichi 2009: fg. 2B; Pope et al. 2010: fg. 1). Therefore, the world’s heaviest bony fsh that has been actually weighed and recorded to date is a specimen of M. alexandrini, and not M. mola. However, this species may grow even larger; we could confirm a maximal length of 332.0 cm TL for a female specimen (not weighed) caught of Aji Island, Miyagi, Japan, on 11 August 2004 (Fig. 4a; see also Yoshita et al. 2009).

This makes the heaviest extant bony fish M. alexandrini, not M. mola. The excerpt above also reveals that a female specimen caught in 2004 could be confirmed to have a maximal length of 332 cm (Sawai et al., 2018).


However, a recent publication has confirmed an even larger specimen than the 2.3 tonne female. Another M. alexandrini was found to weigh 2,744 kg (Gomes-Pereira et al., 2022).

[Supercommunist]

Jusr curiuous would any happen to know how much taller theropods would be if they stood upright like in the outdated depictions?

[Infinity Blade]

Nov 13, 2022 4:10:36 GMT 5 Supercommunist said:

Jusr curiuous would any happen to know how much taller theropods would be if they stood upright like in the outdated depictions?

Farlow (1994) notes that a "big tyrannosaur" (presumably T. rex) would have been some 6 meters tall if reared up. Greg Paul, in his volume in The Tyrant King, gives 4-6 meters for adult tyrannosaurids in general (representing smaller and larger genera, respectively), citing Farlow's work.

If we compare two carnivores of different height, a quadrupedal mammal whose eye is 1 meter above the ground, and a big tyrannosaur whose eye is 6 meters above the ground, and if we assume that the visual acuity of the two animals is such that each meat-eater can perceive carcasses as far away as the spot where its line of sight intersects the ground, then in the flat-earth model the tyrannosaur can monitor an area 36 times that which the mammal can observe.

sci-hub.wf/10.1080/10292389409380450