This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better cooling system!<p>Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B. West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and puts them in a wider context:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc</a>
TLDR:<p>If you burrow down — all the way down — to a typical cell in an elephant, and then compare it to a typical cell in a mouse — amazingly, the two cells behave differently.<p>Elephant cells aren’t lazy. They’re always working, but compared to mouse cells, elephant cells typically do their job a little more slowly, burn less fuel to get the job done and, being more efficient, they run cooler.*<p>So that’s why elephants don’t spontaneously combust (and neither do we, much to Calvin’s relief.) An elephant is built from cooler stuff than a mouse. Even though an elephant has many, many more little heaters packed inside its body, each heater runs at a much lower setting.
Reminiscent of JBS Haldane's Classic essay "On Being The Right Size", which I recommend to anyone who liked this. <a href="http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html" rel="nofollow">http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html</a>
This reminds me a lot of the works of David Macaulay, the art style and writing style are very similar. He wrote some great books, amazing for curious kids.
Interestingly according to this some of the species farthest from the line of best fit (in both directions) are bats.<p>Pteropus Giganteus (Indian Flying Fox) appears to have an extraordinatorily slow metabolic rate per kg, scoring 0.044, yet Rousettus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian Fruit Bat) scores 5.508.
The scroll on this site is unusable - it kept scrolling too far or not enough. The performance is awful too (low framerate on an i7-4790K + NVidia 980 Ti, which should be able to handle some simple scrolling)