Answer: Bowhead Whale

If you’re looking for the largest mouth around, it would make sense to look towards the largest creatures to find it—although sheer mass isn’t always a guarantee that you’ll have a big mouth. Elephants, for example, are the largest land mammals but have relatively small mouths compared to their bodies. Even the largest mammal of all, the blue whale, doesn’t have a particularly large mouth compared to the size of its body.

To find the largest mouth, we have to work our way down the list of large whales for a bit until we get to the Arctic-dwelling bowhead whale. A mature bowhead whale can have a mouth that can open up to be 16 feet (5 meters) long, 12 feet (4 meters) high, and 8 feet (2.5 meters) wide—so wide you could easily park a car in it.

But don’t worry, the bowhead whale isn’t interested in eating cars (or their drivers for that matter). The bowhead is a baleen whale (it doesn’t have teeth but long keratinous plates that are used as a sort of filter to strain food out of the water) and its mouth is an absolutely enormous scoop it uses to sweep up huge quantities of food. It sustains itself by consuming roughly two tons of plankton-like amphipods and other crustaceans every day.