What is the Largest Land Animal that Ever Lived?
The largest land animal that ever lived is likely Amphicoelias fragillimus, a sauropod dinosaur known only from a single vertebra fossil fragment, measuring 1.5 m (5 ft) in height, which has since been lost. In its complete form, it was estimated the entire vertebrae fossil would have been 2.7 m (8.8 ft) tall. A gigantic fossilized femur was also discovered near the vertebra. Extrapolating from the size of the femur, and assuming A. fragillimus had proportions similar to a typical diplodocid (a family of long and slender sauropods), its estimated length (including tail) was 58 m (190 feet), much longer than the blue whale, often cited as the largest animal that has ever lived, at only 30-33 m (98-110 ft) in length. Being slender, however, its weight would have been only about 130 tons, less than the 195 ton record for a blue whale or the 190-240 ton estimate for the weight of Bruhathkayosaurus (whose name means “huge-bodied lizard”), another sauropod. Because of the unknown whereabouts
