As I was trying to get to sleep last night, I found myself pondering the immensity of the blue whale. Of course my consciousness of this immensity comes chiefly from the not-entirely-lifelike model hanging from the Hall of Ocean Life at the Museum of Natural History. Still, the exhibit is evocative enough to make a person pause and say: Jesus, that is one effed up animal.
If I'm honest with myself, I'll admit that I'm usually disappointed by the size of dinosaurs. You think of the age of giants, and you imagine life taking place on a scale far removed from the modern world. Then you see a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, and it's roughly the size of a golden retriever standing on her hind legs. Even the brontosaurus is pretty much all neck and tail.
But the size of the blue whale blankens the mind. It's the largest animal that ever lived, and it lives right now, in the same oceans that a regular little person can go swimming in. How vast, then, must those oceans be, and how lonesome it is to think about a creature that exists on a scale that is absolutely singular among living things.
