The search for Big Momma and the giants of the deep
In short: Beyond the museum's 80 million specimens lies a living frontier. From the world's largest recorded coral in American Samoa to the prehistoric predators of the Jurassic oceans, scientists are still uncovering the true scale of Earth's most massive lifeforms.
In the waters of American Samoa, the Catlin Seaview Survey team is currently engaged in a vital scientific mission: documenting the global health of coral reefs. Their search has led them to 'Big Momma,' the largest recorded coral on Earth. This expedition represents the cutting edge of marine biology, moving beyond the fossilized remains held in institutions like the Natural History Museum in London to observe living ecosystems in real-time.
The history of discovering giants is equally profound. In 1842, anatomist Richard Owen coined the term 'Dinosauria'—derived from the Greek words for 'terrible lizard'—to categorize three specific animals: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus. These specimens, unearthed in southern England during the early 19th century, revealed a biological blueprint unlike anything previously known. Unlike the aquatic ichthyosaurs or the sprawled limbs of lizards, these creatures possessed a columnar limb structure similar to modern elephants.
While the museum's permanent collections house everything from meteorites to giant squid, the fossil record remains tantalizingly incomplete. Although the clade Dinosauria now includes over 800 generic names and at least 1,000 species, many of these classifications are based on fragmentary material. Scientists estimate that the known dinosaurian taxa represent only 10 to 25 percent of their actual past diversity. Even more strikingly, the fossilized remains we possess likely represent less than 0.0001 percent of all individual dinosaurs that ever lived, leaving much of the Mesozoic Era's true scale a mystery yet to be solved.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Join a dive to see the largest corals on Earth | Natural History Museum
- Also: www.britannica.com — Natural History Museum | Dinosaurs, Fossils & Exhibits | Britannica
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