Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. Lauren Bogabam here. Godzilla has remarkable staying power.
Speaker 1: Movies about giant monsters were a dime a dozen back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties. Yet while atomic aged classics like
Speaker 1: The Giant Claw or The Beast from twenty Thousand Fathoms
Speaker 1: never garnered any sequels, Godzilla forged on. The Kaiju made
Speaker 1: his cinematic debut in nineteen fifty four, and since then
Speaker 1: he starred in more than thirty films spanning six and
Speaker 1: a half decades, with his newest debuting in March of
Speaker 1: The character's origin story keeps getting rewritten. He's usually said
Speaker 1: to be an irradiated beast of prehistoric origins, but the
Speaker 1: specifics vary from movie to movie. One thing that's remained consistent, however,
Speaker 1: is Godzilla's physical toughness. On screen, the Behemoth is practically invincible,
Speaker 1: But have you ever wondered how or if a beast
Speaker 1: with Godzilla's dimensions would function in real life? And what
Speaker 1: kind of animal would Godzilla be? Anyway? Before the article
Speaker 1: this episode is based on How Stuff Works, spoke with
Speaker 1: Kenneth Carpenter, now a retired paleontologist who was director of
Speaker 1: the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum when how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works spoke with him via email in and he took
Speaker 1: a stab at that second question in essay that he
Speaker 1: wrote for the official Godzilla compendium. Traditionally, the monster has
Speaker 1: been identified as a therapod dinosaur. All carnivorous dinos like,
Speaker 1: for example, Tyrannosaurus rex are classified as therapods sore birds. Now,
Speaker 1: Godzilla's skull looks short and blunt for a theopod. He
Speaker 1: also tends to be depicted with four fingers per hand,
Speaker 1: and he's got multiple rows of bony vertically oriented plates
Speaker 1: running down his back and tail. Using these features, Carpenter
Speaker 1: tentatively assigned Godzilla to Saratosauria, a primitive theropods subgroup. A
Speaker 1: few Saradasaurians had backs like Godzilla's studied with osteoderms, that is,
Speaker 1: bony deposits embedded in the skin, and certain species had
Speaker 1: shortened skulls to boot. And there was another key feature
Speaker 1: that helped the Saratosaurians stand out. A Carpenter explained that
Speaker 1: while some therapods had three, two or even one fingered,
Speaker 1: four limbs. The more primitive subgroups, like the Saratosaurians, had
Speaker 1: four or more digits per hand. Hostaff Works also spoke
Speaker 1: by email with Victoria Arbor, an armored dinosaur expert who's
Speaker 1: the curator of Paleontology at the Royal British Columbia Museum.
Speaker 1: In blog post, Arbor made the case that the King
Speaker 1: of the Monsters might not be a dinosaur at all.
Speaker 1: Maybe he's got more in common with crocodiles. Crocs, alligators
Speaker 1: and their prehistoric kin form a reptilian clade called the
Speaker 1: studists suchian. Arbor noted that osteoderms and four fingered hands
Speaker 1: are more commonly seen in pseudosoukians than they are in
Speaker 1: theory pods, so perhaps Godzilla belongs to the former group.
Speaker 1: Speaking of digits, let's check out Godzilla's feet. In most
Speaker 1: of the original Japanese movies, the big guy has a
Speaker 1: plant a grade stance that means he walks flat on
Speaker 1: his feet like humans. Conversely, digitigrade animals such as dogs
Speaker 1: will walk on their toes while keeping their heels off
Speaker 1: the ground. No known dinosaur, theopod or otherwise was similarly
Speaker 1: flat footed, Barbora said, living crocodilomorphs are PLANTI grade, but
Speaker 1: the jury is still out on whether or not all
Speaker 1: pseudosuchians were plant A grade, especially those that were bipeedle. However,
Speaker 1: for the American made movie Godzilla's feet underwent a dramatic redesign.
Speaker 1: Barbora said, I think you could make the argument that
Speaker 1: Godzilla has hortiselike feet, and many tortoises are also digital
Speaker 1: grade in a manner similar to elephants, with a large
Speaker 1: heel pad supporting upright toes. She also pointed out that
Speaker 1: while quote almost all bipedal dinosaurs only had three weight
Speaker 1: bearing digits per foot, this version of Godzilla keeps quote
Speaker 1: at least four toes on the ground. Truly huge land
Speaker 1: animals such as the long necked dinosaurs, have column shaped
Speaker 1: digital grade feet. Those limbs are really efficient. It's supporting
Speaker 1: massive body weights, and so if Godzilla was a real creature,
Speaker 1: would probably expect him to have Digital grade hind limbs,
Speaker 1: even though study claimed plant to grade animals can swing
Speaker 1: their arms more forcefully in combat, and Godzilla sure loves combat.
Speaker 1: But it's doubtful that Godzilla could physically walk on dry
Speaker 1: land no matter what his feet looked like Hastaff Works,
Speaker 1: also spoke via email with paleontologist Donald Anderson. He said
Speaker 1: getting Godzilla to stand upright and still would be a
Speaker 1: complete nonstarter. Its bones would not be able to support
Speaker 1: its body weight, and its heart would be unable to
Speaker 1: pump blood to the head. This is mostly due to
Speaker 1: what's called the square cube law. But when you scale
Speaker 1: an object up, its mass increases more sharply than its
Speaker 1: surface area. Double the height, weight and length of a
Speaker 1: wooden cube, and you'll also have made the thing eight
Speaker 1: times heavier than it was before. But how would Godzilla
Speaker 1: fare underwater? Henderson works at Canada's Royal Terrell Museum and
Speaker 1: tackles physics related questions about extinct animals. In he used
Speaker 1: computer modeling to test the hypothesis that Spinosaurus, a therapod
Speaker 1: with a large sail on its back, was built for swimming.
Speaker 1: He found that the deep overall body shape of this
Speaker 1: fin backed animal would have made the dinosaur prone to
Speaker 1: tipping over as it swam. So would Godzilla's osteoderms put
Speaker 1: him at the same risk. Henderson doesn't think so, by
Speaker 1: his calculations. The back plates on Stegosaurus Jurassic herbivore who
Speaker 1: influenced Godzilla's design, only represented sevent of that dinosaurs overall
Speaker 1: body mass. Meanwhile, Godzilla's plates appear to make up an
Speaker 1: even smaller fraction of the kaiju's total mass, and so
Speaker 1: Henderson suspects they wouldn't cause him to tip over during swimming. Still,
Speaker 1: as a marine animal, Godzilla would face plenty of other problems.
Speaker 1: The seagoing creatures tend to be streamlined. With his jagged
Speaker 1: osteoderms and chunky legs, Godzilla is anything but Therefore, he
Speaker 1: had need to expend lots of extra energy in order
Speaker 1: to propel himself through the water. Henderson explained the best
Speaker 1: option for Godzilla to swim would be to undulate its
Speaker 1: body and tail to produce waves that travel down the body.
Speaker 1: To think of how crocodiles and salamanders swim. When they
Speaker 1: want to move quickly, they fold their arms and legs
Speaker 1: close to the body and use sideways motions to push
Speaker 1: back against the water and get a forward thrust. And
Speaker 1: by the way, the semi aquatic behavior was and still
Speaker 1: is widespread among the Pseudosyukians. On the other hand, there's
Speaker 1: no proof that any non bird therapod was habitually amphibious,
Speaker 1: and yet some of them did take the occasional dip.
Speaker 1: In Utah, there's a series of a hundred ninety million
Speaker 1: year old tracks made by therapods whose toes barely scraped
Speaker 1: the ground as they swam along. For his part, Carpenter
Speaker 1: disagrees with the pseudosuchian identity argument, since therapods could clearly swim.
Speaker 1: He thinks godzillas see going ways don't preclude the monster
Speaker 1: from being a bona fide dinosaur. Furthermore, as we've seen
Speaker 1: the Kaiju does share a lot of traits with the seratosaurians.
Speaker 1: If he's not a member of that group, then his
Speaker 1: ancestors probably evolved all of those features independently. This scenario
Speaker 1: is certainly plausible's a phenomenon called convergent evolution. But Carpenter
Speaker 1: thinks the similarities between Godzilla and therapod dinos are probably
Speaker 1: too numerous to be coincidental. The Carpenter said, we already
Speaker 1: know that doctor Yamine, a character from the movie, declared
Speaker 1: the original Godzilla a dinosaur, and since he was on site,
Speaker 1: I'll take his word. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article is Godzilla a Dinosaur? On how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: Com written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and partnership with how stuff works dot Com,
Speaker 1: and it's produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.