Showing vs Telling

So I just started watching Blue Planet on Netflix. It starts off with David Attenborough convincingly describing the size of a blue whale:

Dwarfed by the vast expanse of the open ocean, the biggest animal that has ever lived on our planet: A blue whale, 30 meters long and weighing over 200 tonnes. It’s far bigger than even the biggest dinosaur. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant; its heart is the size of a car; and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them. Its tail, alone, is the width of a small aircraft’s wings.

Whereas I would've been tempted to say something like:  

Blue whales are really fucking big, you guys. These are monstrous motherfuckers. So big, you just would not believe.

 Of course, that's because I'm not a very good writer. I've been struggling with this in my med school apps; I can tell my essays tend to be very abstract and thinky, without enough impact and incident. But thinking of specific examples is hard!