The biggest cell in the world

Our bodies are made up of cells, and each kind of cell does its own job. Some cells are bigger than others, but do you know what the biggest cell in the world is? It’s an egg!

If you crack a chicken egg into a bowl and look at it, that yellow part is a cell. If you look carefully at the inside of the shell, you can see a thin, clear membrane sticking to it. That’s the cell membrane that contains the yolk and the white, which helps protect the egg cell and the growing chicken from everything that’s going on around it.

Eggs come in all different shapes and sizes, but the largest cell that exists in the world right now is an ostrich egg. It’s about the size of a canteloupe, and weighs 3.3 pounds! The shell is also very thick – it has to be for a 300 pound ostrich mom to be able to sit on it without breaking it.

You can even eat an ostrich egg. It’s equal to 24 chicken eggs, so if you wanted a boiled egg, you’d need to leave it in your pot for about an hour!

Eggs can be very tiny, too. The smallest egg with a hard shell is laid by the bee hummingbird. Their eggs weigh 0.2 ounces and are about the size of a small pea. That means you could fit 4,700 bee hummingbird eggs inside one ostrich egg!

But the biggest egg ever laid belongs to the elephant bird. Elephant birds have been extinct since the 1600s, and their eggs were 15 times bigger than an ostrich egg – equal to 200 chicken eggs! That’s a lot of cell!