Size of Life

if anyone that made this sees this, you made a typo on the Dwarf Lanternshark, its not Columbia, its ColOmbia

If I see a neal.fun link on HN, I click.

You are an artist, a good one .

beautiful illustrations, beautiful site

A week ago, I learned that animals weren't bigger in the past.

Sure, there were dinosaurs that were quite big, but they weren't living all at the same time. So there was maybe a big one, that died out, and the next big one would evolve much later.

As this project shows, the biggest animals and plants are living right now.

Also, we're living in the time with the biggest spiders in history. Somehow they don't get that big on average. Turns out, the high oxygen levels in the past didn't affect arachnid sizes as much as insect sizes.

This is what the web should be

I always click when I see neal.fun.

Just delightful, thank you Neal.

Nice that the back button works.

Why not the super cluster?

Illustrations are fantastic

That was fun, neal.fun.

!! super nice thanks !

it seems strange E. Coli can fit 70,000 ribosomes

beautiful soundscapes

Neurons are huge

Why would th3 website switch from metric to usa units out of nowhere m

What made the DNA?

Great use of sound!

awesome that there was a banana for scale!

cool and artistic app, how did you make this

amazing job

Neal is him

Visually this is nice, but navigation-wise I absolutely hate the UI.

I don't want to have to keep on scrolling to "discover" new images.

Well made!

The visual scale seems off, especially on the smaller end of things. Also, are Velociraptors really that small? Jurassic Park lied to me.

The first page looks like a book. It's awesome. Thanks, so refreshing. No fucking inhuman cookie banner.

where is Solaris?

My kids will LOVE this

nicely done.

Banana, ha ha.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

Sorry to say that my first reaction was that this is heresy. . . all this talk of science is a hoax.

But then the music calmed me right down and I wended my way through, not understanding 99% of what I saw but in awe of nature and Neal's art nonetheless.

I wish Neal would do behind the scenes, how he built this art. I wonder whether LLM assistants like Claude Code make such an interactive show more feasible.

He previously did a game "Infinite Craft" which leveraged Llama models. However, I was only able to find an outdated blog from 2019.

Interesting things from this:

- Smallest animal: Myxobolus Shekel. Smaller than a WBC at 10 micrometeres.

- Biggest butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing. Bigger than human brain at 18cm.

- Largest insect to ever live: Meganeura (283 MYA). At 40cm long, a dragonfly larger than a house cat.

- Rafflesias are larger than German Shepherds

- Earth's largest crab: Japanese Spider Crab. 1m, legs pan of 3.75m. More than half the size of a human.

- Always thought Mososaurs were largest animal to ever live but it's the Blue whale at 26m. I don't think I ever appreciated how unfathomably huge they are. (The largest Mosasaur found was 13m. There's a speculated size of 17m as well.)

- World's largest living tree: Hyperion - a giant redwood in california at 115m.

Love seeing something so polished and inspiring. Amazing illustrations and even better music.

Thanks Neal for these projects!