Most animals change proportions as they grow. A coiled shell doesn't have to. Add one turn and the whole shell is just 2.2x bigger, same shape. Watch this one grow forever without changing at all. 🧪🐌 #HowToBuildAGiant #MarineLife
October 8, 2026 at 2:01 PM
Most animals change proportions as they grow. A coiled shell doesn't have to. Add one turn and the whole shell is just 2.2x bigger, same shape. Watch this one grow forever without changing at all. 🧪🐌 #HowToBuildAGiant #MarineLife
Some glass sponges may be the oldest animals on Earth. Individuals of Monorhaphis chuni are estimated at over 11,000 years old, and they build a single skeletal spike up to 3m long, the largest natural glass structure any animal makes. 🧪 #SpongeThursday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
September 17, 2026 at 5:17 PM
Some glass sponges may be the oldest animals on Earth. Individuals of Monorhaphis chuni are estimated at over 11,000 years old, and they build a single skeletal spike up to 3m long, the largest natural glass structure any animal makes. 🧪 #SpongeThursday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
The twist: it isn't all decline. Some groups get bigger. Cephalopods and scaphopods are projected to grow in the Arctic. Squid and octopus, with high metabolisms and no heavy shell to build, may actually do well in a warming, oxygen-shifting ocean. 🦑 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
August 31, 2026 at 8:48 PM
The twist: it isn't all decline. Some groups get bigger. Cephalopods and scaphopods are projected to grow in the Arctic. Squid and octopus, with high metabolisms and no heavy shell to build, may actually do well in a warming, oxygen-shifting ocean. 🦑 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
A very on-theme #MolluscMonday: our new PNAS paper projects how 23,000+ mollusc species will change size as the ocean warms. Most shrink, some grow, and which happens comes down to body plan. Clams downsize. Squid may bulk up. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
August 31, 2026 at 9:00 PM
A very on-theme #MolluscMonday: our new PNAS paper projects how 23,000+ mollusc species will change size as the ocean warms. Most shrink, some grow, and which happens comes down to body plan. Clams downsize. Squid may bulk up. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
Under high emissions, mean body size drops in 68% of cases (34 of 50 class-basin combinations), some clades shrinking ~16% in length. But because mass scales with length^3 that's up to a 46% loss in the mass of an average species. Small length changes, huge biomass consequences. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
August 31, 2026 at 8:47 PM
Under high emissions, mean body size drops in 68% of cases (34 of 50 class-basin combinations), some clades shrinking ~16% in length. But because mass scales with length^3 that's up to a 46% loss in the mass of an average species. Small length changes, huge biomass consequences. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
Huge congratulations to lead author Isaac Trindade-Santos, and to coauthors Tom Webb, Noel Heim, and the team. Built on the MOBS database and OBIS. Open access, all code and data public. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Nonuniform resizing of marine life under climate change | PNAS
Global warming is often predicted to drive universal declines in animal body size,
but empirical evidence remains equivocal. This is particularly t...
doi.org
August 31, 2026 at 8:49 PM
Huge congratulations to lead author Isaac Trindade-Santos, and to coauthors Tom Webb, Noel Heim, and the team. Built on the MOBS database and OBIS. Open access, all code and data public. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
The largest arthropod ever was a sea scorpion. Jaekelopterus stretched about 2.5 meters, longer than a person is tall, hunting the seas 400 million years ago with claws half a meter long. Nothing with an exoskeleton has come close since. 🦂 🧪 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant Artwork by Dani Navarro
August 28, 2026 at 2:51 PM
The largest arthropod ever was a sea scorpion. Jaekelopterus stretched about 2.5 meters, longer than a person is tall, hunting the seas 400 million years ago with claws half a meter long. Nothing with an exoskeleton has come close since. 🦂 🧪 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant Artwork by Dani Navarro
The heaviest living thing on Earth isn't a whale or a tree, it's a fungus in Oregon spread across 2,000+ acres and thousands of years old, most of it underground. We picture giants as tall. Some of the biggest just quietly went wide, out of sight. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #plants
August 28, 2026 at 2:54 PM
The heaviest living thing on Earth isn't a whale or a tree, it's a fungus in Oregon spread across 2,000+ acres and thousands of years old, most of it underground. We picture giants as tall. Some of the biggest just quietly went wide, out of sight. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #plants
Godzilla could never actually stand. Scale a body up and weight climbs faster than bones can bear, so a lizard the size of a building would collapse under itself. The only place to be that big is the ocean, where water carries the weight. Kaiju would all need to be marine. #HowToBuildAGiant #Kaiju
August 28, 2026 at 2:52 PM
Godzilla could never actually stand. Scale a body up and weight climbs faster than bones can bear, so a lizard the size of a building would collapse under itself. The only place to be that big is the ocean, where water carries the weight. Kaiju would all need to be marine. #HowToBuildAGiant #Kaiju
A giant clam can top 200 kg and live over a century, but it barely feeds. It farms algae in its colorful mantle, living on the sugar they make in sunlight. Its blue-green cells act like lenses, aiming light at the captive gardens inside. Sunlight built this giant. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
August 25, 2026 at 5:22 PM
A giant clam can top 200 kg and live over a century, but it barely feeds. It farms algae in its colorful mantle, living on the sugar they make in sunlight. Its blue-green cells act like lenses, aiming light at the captive gardens inside. Sunlight built this giant. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
This is why it matters for size. Most animals are limited by how much food they can catch. A giant clam outsources feeding to a solar-powered workforce living in its own body, so it can pour energy into sheer bulk instead. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
August 25, 2026 at 5:26 PM
This is why it matters for size. Most animals are limited by how much food they can catch. A giant clam outsources feeding to a solar-powered workforce living in its own body, so it can pour energy into sheer bulk instead. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
13mya in Colombia, the top predator wasn't a big cat or a bear. Probably Purussaurus, a caiman relative bigger than a bus. Bite marks found on the skulls & bones of massive hoofed mammals. South America was short on large mammal predators, so a crocodile filled the gap. #HowToBuildAGiant
August 18, 2026 at 12:09 AM
13mya in Colombia, the top predator wasn't a big cat or a bear. Probably Purussaurus, a caiman relative bigger than a bus. Bite marks found on the skulls & bones of massive hoofed mammals. South America was short on large mammal predators, so a crocodile filled the gap. #HowToBuildAGiant
The female blanket octopus trails meters of iridescent webbing. The male is the size of a walnut, one of the widest size gaps between sexes of any animal. He hangs out in man o' war tentacles sometimes tearing them off and using them as weapons. #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
August 17, 2026 at 7:57 PM
The female blanket octopus trails meters of iridescent webbing. The male is the size of a walnut, one of the widest size gaps between sexes of any animal. He hangs out in man o' war tentacles sometimes tearing them off and using them as weapons. #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
Two deep-sea giants, two ways to hold on. The colossal squid grips prey with rotating, swiveling hooks on its arms. The giant squid instead lines its suckers with rings of sharp, saw-like teeth, the ones that scar sperm whales. Same problem, two brutal solutions. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant
August 10, 2026 at 2:29 PM
Two deep-sea giants, two ways to hold on. The colossal squid grips prey with rotating, swiveling hooks on its arms. The giant squid instead lines its suckers with rings of sharp, saw-like teeth, the ones that scar sperm whales. Same problem, two brutal solutions. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant
After a day of Megalodon, something calm. The tallest living thing is a redwood, and the heaviest is a fungus in Oregon spread across 2,000+ acres. The biggest organisms on Earth aren't animals at all. #plants #HowToBuildAGiant
August 7, 2026 at 10:24 PM
After a day of Megalodon, something calm. The tallest living thing is a redwood, and the heaviest is a fungus in Oregon spread across 2,000+ acres. The biggest organisms on Earth aren't animals at all. #plants #HowToBuildAGiant
Spent today explaining why Megalodon is extinct. But here's what art does that my thread can't: make you feel the size. A good scale drawing of Megalodon next to a diver lands harder than any number I can give you. Show me your favorite size-comparison art. 🧪 #SciArt #HowToBuildAGiant
August 7, 2026 at 10:23 PM
Spent today explaining why Megalodon is extinct. But here's what art does that my thread can't: make you feel the size. A good scale drawing of Megalodon next to a diver lands harder than any number I can give you. Show me your favorite size-comparison art. 🧪 #SciArt #HowToBuildAGiant
10/10
Documentaries reporting they might exist are scams, with disclaimers too small to notice. Megalodon was real, magnificent, and genuinely gone. Full writeup here: deepseanews.com/2017/12/how-... 🦈 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
Documentaries reporting they might exist are scams, with disclaimers too small to notice. Megalodon was real, magnificent, and genuinely gone. Full writeup here: deepseanews.com/2017/12/how-... 🦈 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
https://deepseanews.com/2017/12/how-we-know-megalodon-doesnt-still-exist/🦈
August 7, 2026 at 5:33 PM
10/10
Documentaries reporting they might exist are scams, with disclaimers too small to notice. Megalodon was real, magnificent, and genuinely gone. Full writeup here: deepseanews.com/2017/12/how-... 🦈 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
Documentaries reporting they might exist are scams, with disclaimers too small to notice. Megalodon was real, magnificent, and genuinely gone. Full writeup here: deepseanews.com/2017/12/how-... 🦈 #FossilFriday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
6/10
But aren't there huge sharks? Yes. Greenland, basking, whale, great white, sevengill, all enormous. My colleagues and I actually studied how big these get. Only the largest whale sharks approach Megalodon lengths, and none match its shape or teeth. 🦈 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
But aren't there huge sharks? Yes. Greenland, basking, whale, great white, sevengill, all enormous. My colleagues and I actually studied how big these get. Only the largest whale sharks approach Megalodon lengths, and none match its shape or teeth. 🦈 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
August 7, 2026 at 5:31 PM
6/10
But aren't there huge sharks? Yes. Greenland, basking, whale, great white, sevengill, all enormous. My colleagues and I actually studied how big these get. Only the largest whale sharks approach Megalodon lengths, and none match its shape or teeth. 🦈 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
But aren't there huge sharks? Yes. Greenland, basking, whale, great white, sevengill, all enormous. My colleagues and I actually studied how big these get. Only the largest whale sharks approach Megalodon lengths, and none match its shape or teeth. 🦈 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
Good #SciArt does something science needs: it makes size real. "70 cm" or "30 meters" means little until an artist puts the animal beside a human, a car, a diver. Scale art is how we actually grasp a blue whale or a giant trilobite. Art is how size becomes understandable. 🧪 #SciArt #HowToBuildAGiant
August 4, 2026 at 4:20 PM
Good #SciArt does something science needs: it makes size real. "70 cm" or "30 meters" means little until an artist puts the animal beside a human, a car, a diver. Scale art is how we actually grasp a blue whale or a giant trilobite. Art is how size becomes understandable. 🧪 #SciArt #HowToBuildAGiant
Meet the biggest trilobite that ever lived: Isotelus rex, over 70 cm long, longer than your arm, found nearly whole on the shore of Hudson Bay. Most trilobites were thumb-sized. This one was a tennis-racket predator crawling the seafloor 450 million years ago. 🧪 #TrilobiteTuesday #HowToBuildAGiant
August 4, 2026 at 4:17 PM
Meet the biggest trilobite that ever lived: Isotelus rex, over 70 cm long, longer than your arm, found nearly whole on the shore of Hudson Bay. Most trilobites were thumb-sized. This one was a tennis-racket predator crawling the seafloor 450 million years ago. 🧪 #TrilobiteTuesday #HowToBuildAGiant
300 million years ago, dragonflies the size of hawks patrolled the swamps and millipedes grew longer than your leg. The air was richer in oxygen then, and insects breathe through passive tubes that only reach so far into the body. More oxygen, bigger bug. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
August 4, 2026 at 4:12 PM
300 million years ago, dragonflies the size of hawks patrolled the swamps and millipedes grew longer than your leg. The air was richer in oxygen then, and insects breathe through passive tubes that only reach so far into the body. More oxygen, bigger bug. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
Body size, since it's my thing: Smoky Mountain salamanders run from the two-inch pygmy to the hellbender, which reaches over two feet. Same group, wildly different sizes, tuned to how much oxygen they can pull through their skin at each size. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
July 29, 2026 at 2:53 PM
Body size, since it's my thing: Smoky Mountain salamanders run from the two-inch pygmy to the hellbender, which reaches over two feet. Same group, wildly different sizes, tuned to how much oxygen they can pull through their skin at each size. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
Coast redwoods top 100 meters, and at that height pulling water up from the roots nearly fails. Their fix: absorb fog straight through their needles. That is why they only grow in California's coastal fog belt. The tallest trees on Earth cheat physics with fog. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #plants
July 27, 2026 at 2:53 PM
Coast redwoods top 100 meters, and at that height pulling water up from the roots nearly fails. Their fix: absorb fog straight through their needles. That is why they only grow in California's coastal fog belt. The tallest trees on Earth cheat physics with fog. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #plants
#Godzilla could never stand up. Square-cube law: scale an animal up and its weight grows faster than its bones can bear, so a lizard the size of a building collapses under itself. The only place to be that big is the ocean, where water carries the weight. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
July 27, 2026 at 2:47 PM
#Godzilla could never stand up. Square-cube law: scale an animal up and its weight grows faster than its bones can bear, so a lizard the size of a building collapses under itself. The only place to be that big is the ocean, where water carries the weight. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant
Syrinx aruanus, the Australian trumpet, is the largest snail alive, a shell up to about 75 cm and 18 kg. Why so big? It hunts giant polychaete worms over a meter long, reaching into their tubes with a proboscis up to 25 cm. Big prey, big predator. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife
July 27, 2026 at 2:45 PM
Syrinx aruanus, the Australian trumpet, is the largest snail alive, a shell up to about 75 cm and 18 kg. Why so big? It hunts giant polychaete worms over a meter long, reaching into their tubes with a proboscis up to 25 cm. Big prey, big predator. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife