What Kind of Animal Is Godzilla?

If Godzilla were real, what kind of animal would it be -- and could it even survive with such an impressive body mass? Learn what researchers think in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/godzilla.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff. Lauren Bogabam here. Godzilla has remarkable staying power.
Movies about giant monsters were a dime a dozen back
in the nineteen fifties. Yet while atomic aged classics like
The Giant Claw or The Beast from twenty Thousand Fathoms

(00:22):
never garnered any sequels, Godzilla forged on. The Kaiju made
his cinematic debut in nineteen fifty four, and since then
he starred in more than thirty films spanning six and
a half decades, with his newest debuting in March of
The character's origin story keeps getting rewritten. He's usually said

(00:42):
to be an irradiated beast of prehistoric origins, but the
specifics vary from movie to movie. One thing that's remained consistent, however,
is Godzilla's physical toughness. On screen, the Behemoth is practically invincible,
But have you ever wondered how or if a beast
with Godzilla's dimensions would function in real life? And what

(01:05):
kind of animal would Godzilla be? Anyway? Before the article
this episode is based on How Stuff Works, spoke with
Kenneth Carpenter, now a retired paleontologist who was director of
the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum when how Stuff
Works spoke with him via email in and he took
a stab at that second question in essay that he

(01:27):
wrote for the official Godzilla compendium. Traditionally, the monster has
been identified as a therapod dinosaur. All carnivorous dinos like,
for example, Tyrannosaurus rex are classified as therapods sore birds. Now,
Godzilla's skull looks short and blunt for a theopod. He

(01:48):
also tends to be depicted with four fingers per hand,
and he's got multiple rows of bony vertically oriented plates
running down his back and tail. Using these features, Carpenter
tentatively assigned Godzilla to Saratosauria, a primitive theropods subgroup. A
few Saradasaurians had backs like Godzilla's studied with osteoderms, that is,

(02:10):
bony deposits embedded in the skin, and certain species had
shortened skulls to boot. And there was another key feature
that helped the Saratosaurians stand out. A Carpenter explained that
while some therapods had three, two or even one fingered,
four limbs. The more primitive subgroups, like the Saratosaurians, had
four or more digits per hand. Hostaff Works also spoke

(02:35):
by email with Victoria Arbor, an armored dinosaur expert who's
the curator of Paleontology at the Royal British Columbia Museum.
In blog post, Arbor made the case that the King
of the Monsters might not be a dinosaur at all.
Maybe he's got more in common with crocodiles. Crocs, alligators
and their prehistoric kin form a reptilian clade called the

(02:59):
studists suchian. Arbor noted that osteoderms and four fingered hands
are more commonly seen in pseudosoukians than they are in
theory pods, so perhaps Godzilla belongs to the former group.
Speaking of digits, let's check out Godzilla's feet. In most
of the original Japanese movies, the big guy has a

(03:19):
plant a grade stance that means he walks flat on
his feet like humans. Conversely, digitigrade animals such as dogs
will walk on their toes while keeping their heels off
the ground. No known dinosaur, theopod or otherwise was similarly
flat footed, Barbora said, living crocodilomorphs are PLANTI grade, but

(03:41):
the jury is still out on whether or not all
pseudosuchians were plant A grade, especially those that were bipeedle. However,
for the American made movie Godzilla's feet underwent a dramatic redesign.
Barbora said, I think you could make the argument that
Godzilla has hortiselike feet, and many tortoises are also digital

(04:03):
grade in a manner similar to elephants, with a large
heel pad supporting upright toes. She also pointed out that
while quote almost all bipedal dinosaurs only had three weight
bearing digits per foot, this version of Godzilla keeps quote
at least four toes on the ground. Truly huge land

(04:24):
animals such as the long necked dinosaurs, have column shaped
digital grade feet. Those limbs are really efficient. It's supporting
massive body weights, and so if Godzilla was a real creature,
would probably expect him to have Digital grade hind limbs,
even though study claimed plant to grade animals can swing
their arms more forcefully in combat, and Godzilla sure loves combat.

(04:49):
But it's doubtful that Godzilla could physically walk on dry
land no matter what his feet looked like Hastaff Works,
also spoke via email with paleontologist Donald Anderson. He said
getting Godzilla to stand upright and still would be a
complete nonstarter. Its bones would not be able to support
its body weight, and its heart would be unable to

(05:10):
pump blood to the head. This is mostly due to
what's called the square cube law. But when you scale
an object up, its mass increases more sharply than its
surface area. Double the height, weight and length of a
wooden cube, and you'll also have made the thing eight
times heavier than it was before. But how would Godzilla

(05:31):
fare underwater? Henderson works at Canada's Royal Terrell Museum and
tackles physics related questions about extinct animals. In he used
computer modeling to test the hypothesis that Spinosaurus, a therapod
with a large sail on its back, was built for swimming.
He found that the deep overall body shape of this

(05:52):
fin backed animal would have made the dinosaur prone to
tipping over as it swam. So would Godzilla's osteoderms put
him at the same risk. Henderson doesn't think so, by
his calculations. The back plates on Stegosaurus Jurassic herbivore who
influenced Godzilla's design, only represented sevent of that dinosaurs overall

(06:14):
body mass. Meanwhile, Godzilla's plates appear to make up an
even smaller fraction of the kaiju's total mass, and so
Henderson suspects they wouldn't cause him to tip over during swimming. Still,
as a marine animal, Godzilla would face plenty of other problems.
The seagoing creatures tend to be streamlined. With his jagged

(06:35):
osteoderms and chunky legs, Godzilla is anything but Therefore, he
had need to expend lots of extra energy in order
to propel himself through the water. Henderson explained the best
option for Godzilla to swim would be to undulate its
body and tail to produce waves that travel down the body.
To think of how crocodiles and salamanders swim. When they

(06:57):
want to move quickly, they fold their arms and legs
close to the body and use sideways motions to push
back against the water and get a forward thrust. And
by the way, the semi aquatic behavior was and still
is widespread among the Pseudosyukians. On the other hand, there's
no proof that any non bird therapod was habitually amphibious,

(07:20):
and yet some of them did take the occasional dip.
In Utah, there's a series of a hundred ninety million
year old tracks made by therapods whose toes barely scraped
the ground as they swam along. For his part, Carpenter
disagrees with the pseudosuchian identity argument, since therapods could clearly swim.

(07:40):
He thinks godzillas see going ways don't preclude the monster
from being a bona fide dinosaur. Furthermore, as we've seen
the Kaiju does share a lot of traits with the seratosaurians.
If he's not a member of that group, then his
ancestors probably evolved all of those features independently. This scenario
is certainly plausible's a phenomenon called convergent evolution. But Carpenter

(08:03):
thinks the similarities between Godzilla and therapod dinos are probably
too numerous to be coincidental. The Carpenter said, we already
know that doctor Yamine, a character from the movie, declared
the original Godzilla a dinosaur, and since he was on site,
I'll take his word. Today's episode is based on the

(08:28):
article is Godzilla a Dinosaur? On how stuff works dot
Com written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of
I Heart Radio and partnership with how stuff works dot Com,
and it's produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts my
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