Humans
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If you’ve ever worried about the size of your nose, pity poor Thomas Wedders. His was, without a doubt, bigger than yours.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.How do we know? Because Thomas had the dubious distinction of owning the largest nose ever recorded. At 7.5 inches long, or around 19 centimeters, it was more than three times the length of the average adult honker, and about the same as a standard pencil, eraser-to-nib.
Or, at least, that’s what the legends say. Unfortunately, we’ll never know the truth: Wedders was reportedly born in about 1730 – although, in fairness, we couldn’t find any record of that in the old parish records – and the earliest mentions we have of him seem to be from the end of the 19th century. That makes independent verification of his nose length impossible – and frankly, he had reason to lie about it.
See, back in those days, if you had any kind of unusual feature – maybe you were particularly tall or short; maybe you suffered from debilitating Proteus syndrome; maybe you were just half a monkey sewn onto a fish butt – it was a reasonable career move to join a circus or freak show. Wedders, with his princely proboscis, did precisely that – which meant that it benefited him directly if people thought his nose was as long as possible.
We know for sure that other entertainers exaggerated their features to draw crowds: “for example, sideshow entertainer Lucía Zárate (Mexico, 1863-1890), formerly the shortest woman ever, measured 67 cm (26.5 in), but was billed at an even shorter height of 20 inches,” points out Guiness World Records, and “Franz Winkelmeier (1860-1887), Germany's ‘Giant of Friedburg-Lengau’, was billed as standing at 259 cm (8 ft 6 in) but was later measured to be 228 cm (7 ft 6 in).”
If Wedders’s conk really was as long as advertised – or even anywhere close, really – there’s no reason given as to why. More contemporary sources do hint at some kind of intellectual disability: “[the] man expired as he had lived, in a condition of mind best described as the most abject idiocy,” reads a description in the 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. Today, perhaps he might have been diagnosed with some genetic syndrome; back then, he was merely something to gawp at.
Still, with no direct proof of the length and solid reasons to doubt the legend, Wedders has been denied the official record for the world’s longest nose. That instead goes to Mehmet Özyürek, whose 8.8 centimeter (3.46 inch) schnoz was the longest verified in the world until his sudden death in 2023.
“I love it, this feature,” Özyürek once said of his supersized sniffer. “The world likes it […] of course, my wife likes it too!”
