The blue whale is thought to be the world's largest ever creature - bigger than T-Rex and even than Brachiosaurus. So the stories around it are legend, from Jonah of the Bible being swallowed to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
It extends to speculation about the size of the world's biggest heart - bigger than a car, with an aorta you could swim through!
"Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant", according to National Geographic. But finding intact specimens is rare, so it's been hard to verify the hyperbole.
Then in May 2014 a 23.3-metre blue whale washed up in Newfoundland, Canada after being trapped in ice.
Catch of the day. Blue whale carcass in Woody Point, Newfoundland. #whales pic.twitter.com/K7KcEHLVKx— Don Bradshaw (@DonBradshawNTV)
May 8, 2014
It took four team members from the Royal Ontario Museum to push the heart out through a window they made between the whale's ribs and the side of its chest cavity. At 180 kilos, it tips the scales at the point where most scales for people top out. .
And here's where the facts get in the way of the story: "the world's biggest heart" is only as big as a golf cart or fun-fair bumper car. The aorta is about thick as a football.
"We had to get the chest cavity opened to expose the heart and then get in there and free the heart up from all of the surrounding tissues, getting in with what was left of the lungs and blood, pretty much up to my waist" recounted ROM mammalogy technician Jacqueline Miller for an upcoming BBC documentary, Big Blue Live.
"I was expecting something the size of a car, but found a heart more like the size of maybe a small golf cart or circus bumper car for two."
The heart, which measures 1.52m by 1.22m by 1.22m, is preserved in a tank in nearly 4000 litres of formaldehyde.
Palaeontologists estimate that Brachiosaurus, the biggest dinosaur portrayed in Jurassic Park, weighed 62 tons and was 26 metres long. Argentinosaurus is believed to have been the largest ever land mammal, weighing up to 110 tons and measuring 35 metres long. According to the American Cetacean Society the longest blue whale ever caught was 33 metres but the largest can weigh up to 150 tons.
It is estimated 99 per cent of the blue whale population was killed through hunting before it became illegal in 1986. Around 5000-10,000 of the notoriously shy blue whales are believed to live in the southern hemisphere, and only 3000-4000 in the northern hemisphere.
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