Largest organisms one of the largest and oldest clonal colonies on Earth. Among animals, the largest species are all marine mammals, specifically whales. The blue whale is believed to be the largest animal to have ever lived. The largest land animal classification is also dominated by mammals, with the African bush elephant being the most massive of these. The largest single-stem tree by wood volume and mass is the giant sequoia ("Sequoiadendron giganteum"), native to Sierra Nevada and California; it typically grows to a height of and in diameter. Multiple-stem trees such as banyan can be enormous. Thimmamma Marrimanu in India spreads
Largest organisms March 2014 in a soil sample collected from a riverbank in Siberia. Prior to this discovery, the largest virus was the peculiar virus genus "Pandoravirus", which have a size of approximately 1 micrometer and whose genome contains 1,900,000 to 2,500,000 base pairs of DNA. Both these viruses infect amoebas specifically. Largest organisms The largest organisms now found on Earth can be determined according to various aspects of an organism's size, such as: mass, volume, area, length, height, or even genome size. Some organisms group together to form a superorganism (such as ants or bees), but such are not classed as