Larger Than Life

One of the random quirks of zoo animals that I've discovered over the years is that almost no animal is the size that you expect it would be.  Some are much larger, some are much smaller.  Often, I don't appreciate the size difference until I wind up behind-the-scenes with the animal, inches away with only mesh in between.  Even if it's an animal that I've seen dozens of times on exhibit, I'm sometimes blown away by how big or small they are in person, up close.

Lions and tigers surprised me with how huge the were - as a teenage volunteer, I felt our big male lion could look me right in the eyes.  Those are the two largest cat species in the world, so when I finally met the third-largest, the jaguar, I was surprised at how small that animal was compared to the other two - it's a pretty distant third, and our jag didn't come up much higher than my knee.  It was the same with bears - I was amazed at how big polar and grizzly bears were, and how small sun and sloth bears were.

Some animals I just don't know what to expect.  When I met a Sumatran rhino behind-the-scenes at the Cincinnati Zoo, he was so much bigger than I expected.  I knew that they were the smallest of rhinos, but I guess they are still rhinos - I'd been thinking I'd see something the size of a Shetland pony.  Pygmy hippo was another conundrum - yes, there is the word "pygmy," but there's still also the world "hippo."  Porcupines are bigger than I expected - I thought they'd be hedgehog-sized when I was younger.  Beavers blow a lot of people away with their size, too.   Camels I expected to be horse or llama-sized.  Gorillas were actually smaller than I expected, perhaps because you hear so much about "the 800-pound gorilla in the room."

Most birds are a fair bit bigger than I expected - trumpeter swans, pelicans, and condors blew me away with their size.  Reptiles are a trickier lot, since there is so much individual variation in their size, with some specimens being massive and others... average?

The animal that has surprised me the most with its size was the platypus.  Which is strange, because, in anticipation of meeting one at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, I read extensively about them, including their size.  Even so, I think I expected to see something substantially larger, maybe otter-sized, or at least ferret-sized.  Instead, it was about the size of a guinea pig