How Big Is an Elephant?

Bigger and Bigger

The ancestor of the elephant, an animal that lived thirty million years ago, was about the size of a pig. But as elephants evolved they got bigger and bigger, until today they stand taller than a basketball hoop.

Have you heard the saying, “bigger is better”? It must be true of elephants. And of hippos, rhinos, horses, cows, giraffes, and buffaloes. It must be true of all of today’s large animals, because all of them evolved from ancestors that long ago were positively tiny.

And as big as the elephant is today, it could get even bigger in the future.

Or could it?

Art: Elephant and crowd of school kids.

Too Big?

Looking at an elephant makes you wonder: is it possible for an animal to be too big?

Consider how it would feel to weigh five tons. That’s how much an average elephant weighs, about as much as two hundred second-graders. That’s heavy, and an elephant doesn’t have two-hundred pairs of legs to hold it up. It has four legs.

Art: Gazelle and elephant, showing differences in legs.

Art: Show elephant “charging” and horse galloping.

Look at a gazelle’s thin, delicately curved legs. Put those legs under an elephant and they would snap like twigs. An elephant needs thick legs, straight as pillars.

But even with its big legs, an elephant can’t leap or gallop like a horse. In fact it can hardly run at all. An elephant’s best full-speed charge amounts to little more than a fast, stiff-legged walk. After a little of that it’s ready for a nap, but it can’t even lie down to sleep for more than a few hours because its immense weight would bruise the skin on its side.

Art: Something illustrating the text.

Size and Strength

Antelopes can jump, lions can jump, zebras can jump, but the elephant, the strongest animal in the forest, simply doesn’t have the strength to jump. How can that be?

As animals get bigger they get a lot heavier, and more of their muscle power is used just moving their massive bodies around. If you had an elephant’s muscles you would be superhuman, but for the weight of an elephant those same muscles are puny.

SIDEBAR

The Strongest...and the Weakest

Elephants may be the strongest of all land animals, but, pound for pound, they are not even as strong as you.

An adult elephant can lift a two-thousand-pound log with its trunk. But remember those two hundred classmates who together weigh as much as an elephant? If you put them all to work they could lift that log with ease. Each kid’s share of the load would be only ten pounds. Less than the weight of a bowling ball.

If you can lift a bowling ball, then pound for pound you are stronger than an elephant.

END SIDEBAR

Art: Godzilla in a heap.

At some point an animal could become too heavy for its muscles to handle, and it would be stuck right were it sat. Imagine being able to lift three tons, but you were so big your own butt weighed four tons!

That’s why the biggest animals you’ll ever see are in the movies. In real life, there could never be a monster the size of Godzilla. It would collapse in a heap, too feeble to stand up.

Art: Picture of large sauropods in natural environment.

Weighty...

How big is too big? It’s hard to say, but elephants still have room to grow. Look at how huge some of the dinosaurs got. The biggest weighed as much as thirteen elephants. Were they fast? Were they graceful? Were they energetic? No. No. No. They must have been ponderous beasts, moving slowly from tree to tree, eating constantly to fill their gigantic stomachs.

Nothing bigger has ever walked the earth, and it’s possible nothing bigger ever will. That is not to say that dinosaurs were the biggest of all animals. Just the biggest that actually walked.

Art: Graphic of blue whale compared to elephant compared to a dinosaur.

...And Weightless

The best place in the world for giant animals is the ocean. There you will find the blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It can weigh one hundred and fifty tons, as much as thirty elephants. As much as twelve school buses! There’s no way an animal that big could live on land.

Art: Picture of large stranded whale.

Every so often a whale is stranded. It washes up on shore and doesn’t have the strength to overcome its own weight and flop back into the water. A stranded whale is doomed, because the monstrous weight of its body will crush its lungs.

Art: Picture of blue whale in natural environment.

In the ocean, however, the whale doesn’t even feel its weight. It doesn’t sink and it doesn’t rise. It floats perfectly at whatever level it happens to be, like an astronaut taking a space walk. Underwater, the whale is weightless.

That’s why a blue whale is bigger than an elephant or a dinosaur. Bigger than any land animal could possibly be. It does not have to support its own weight. The water does that for it.

Art: Fanciful picture of elephant as a marine mammal, still looking like an elephant, but with fins instead of legs.

How Big is an Elephant?

Titanic! Mammoth! Colossal! Any of these words could describe an elephant. No other living land animal comes close to the elephant’s size. And it could get even bigger, if dinosaurs are any example. But it will never match the vast proportions of the blue whale. Before it reached that size, the elephant’s tremendous weight would defeat it.

Like the ancestors of elephants, whales were once small land animals. But long, long ago, long before the first elephants, the whale’s ancestors took to the sea, where they grew and grew and grew. Imagine if elephants had followed them, giving up land for life in the deep ocean. It’s hard to say what those elephants would look like today, but they would probably be humongous.

Some Words That Mean Big

giant. Big.

gigantic. Giant-like, only bigger.

huge. Really big.

enormous. Extremely big.

colossal. Unbelievably big.

vast. So big you can’t see the end of it.

immense. So big you can’t even measure it.

massive. Big and heavy.

titanic. Big and powerful.

mammoth. Big and clumsy.

tremendous. Big enough to make you shake.

monstrous. So big it’s not funny.

humongous. So big it is funny.

Image: Elephants, from Elephants Alive, http://elephantsalive.org