See the world's biggest heart

Scientists finally saw the heart of the world's largest animal after a ded blue whale washed ashore in Canada.



The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) have some record-breaking internal organs. This is the largest animal to have lived.

Tales of its heart being as huge as a car, with the aorta which us large enough for a human to swim through abound, but as finding intact specimens to research is rare, the truth has been very difficult to search out.

When a dead blue whale washed ashore in Canada, a lot of experts saw a very valuable opportunity.

A team which is from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) was sent to dissect the 76.5ft (23.3m) blue whale, which had died after being trapped in ice.

"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," explains Jacqueline Miller, a mammalogy technician from the ROM. 

"It took four of us to push the heart out through a window we'd made between the ribs and the side of the chest cavity." 

The organ that they retrieved can be seen in the video clip above, taken from Big Blue Live, a new series coming soon to BBC One in the UK and PBS in the US. 

"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," Ms Miller says.