Looking for the next big thing Global appeal of colossal fruit, vegetable or animal landmarks

Perched atop a traffic island in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, is a proboscis monkey. Leaping from a roundabout in Mahdia, Tunisia, is a swordfish. Sprouting from an intersection in Kundasang, Malaysia, is a cabbage.

- Joe Hinchliffe

What unites these model fauna and flora in diverse parts of the world is their giant size. These are not things of ordinary proportion - these things are big. And they are just three of almost 10,000 big things round the world that now, for the first time, have been painstakingly mapped and researched.

Dr Amy Clarke, the woman putting those big pins on the map, is the academic authority on big things (or "larger than life roadside colossi", in scholarly parlance). The University of the Sunshine Coast historian had for years argued - in peer-reviewed articles, no less - for the prevailing wisdom that oversized roadside monuments were a largely US, Canadian and Australian phenomenon.

That was until one day in early 2024 when, while searching a stock photo website for something unrelated, she stumbled upon an image of a big spiky fruit. "This durian, I was just staring at," Clarke recalls. "I was excited, of course, but I also remember thinking... 'Oh no. Oh no.'"

Clarke has a "very visual memory" and says she recalls almost every big thing she has ever seen. And, despite researching roadside monuments for more than a decade, she had never seen that most pungent of fruits made big.

"I remember thinking: 'Oh God, I hope this is the only one I've missed."

It was not. By Clarke's latest count, there are at least 23 big durians scattered throughout countries - including Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand - in which it is revered as king of the fruits.

What followed that first durian was an exhaustive 11-month internet odyssey that would not only upend everything the expert in architectural heritage thought she knew about big things, but how she made sense of the world.