The movie "Godzilla-2: King of the Monsters" was released - the continuation of the story of the legendary lizard-titan, who once again will have to face in a mortal battle with no less formidable representatives of the long-extinct fauna. We decided to tell you about whether a real creature can reach such gigantic proportions and why the ancient depths of the Earth are fraught with many unknown secrets.
Monstrous creatures have attracted man for a long time. The ancient Greeks believed that huge leviathans lurked in the depths of the sea waters, and the image of a winged fire-breathing reptile so firmly entered the culture of medieval Europe that noble families often placed formidable dragons on their family coats of arms. Modern paleontologists with enviable enthusiasm extract from the earth the bones of dinosaurs - real giants who reigned on Earth tens of millions of years ago. In those days, it was size that often determined whether a creature would be able to survive in a world where the main law is "kill so that you don't become prey yourself."
A legend from the Godzilla universe says that Dr. Kyohei Yamane discovered a giant in the Pacific Ocean, whose size did not fit into the reasonable. This monster is probably a mutant, born as a result of a huge dose of radiation. However, as it turned out later, a titan named Godzilla is not the only representative of the colossal fauna that lives on Earth.
So does nature have a higher bar that limits the growth of even its most powerful offspring? Can a living creature surpass a skyscraper in size and give rise to a hurricane in one breath, like characters in myths and legends of the distant past? The answer to this question is far from being as simple as it might seem at first glance. To begin with, let's estimate the dimensions of fictional giants and compare them with large animals known to science.
Duel of the titans: the cost of survival
The rich universe of "Godzilla" gave the world a variety of different monsters, which are easy to find earthly counterparts. The Japanese name Gojira is a combination of two Japanese words: gorira, which means gorilla, and kujira, which means whale. So, the blue whale is the largest mammal on Earth, capable of gaining up to 210 tons of weight. But even he is not able to compete with the colossal mutant lizard. The latter weighs 90,000 tons, that is, Godzilla weighs as a modern aircraft carrier. It would take an incredible flock of 428 whales to fight on equal terms!
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Not only the weight, but also the size of this creature is impressive - Godzilla looks gigantic even in comparison with prehistoric reptiles, because the length of the largest dinosaurs known to science does not exceed 40 meters. But Godzilla's tail alone is 177.4 meters long - if you put it vertically, the tip will be at the height of a modern 60-story skyscraper.
However, there are other characters in comparison with which even Godzilla looks less impressive. For example, the sworn enemy of the titan lizard is King Ghidorah, codenamed Monster Zero. The colossal three-headed titan is frozen in ice, but it is unknown how long nature will be able to contain its power. His height reaches 158.8 meters, which makes him the absolute champion even among the giants. The scans showed that the frontal lobes of the brain of each head are different from each other, and therefore there is a possibility that each can carry out the thought process independently of the others - this makes the creature even more dangerous. The surface of his skin is covered with a layer of gold, which acts as a conductor of the powerful bioelectric discharges that Gidora generates. During flight, the titanium can cause a local storm of incredible strength,and therefore one fact of its existence is a serious threat to people.
Giants in our world
Now that we have realized the incredible size of the monsters from the world of fantasy, let's ask a simple question: why in the real world, animals, especially land animals, do not grow to such dimensions?
Scientists have long been attracted by the phenomenon called "deep-sea gigantism" - the ability of invertebrates living at great depths to reach much larger sizes than their shallow-water relatives. Its mechanism has not yet found an exact scientific explanation. Some hypotheses suggest that it is all about trying to adapt to a lack of food resources. According to others, the reason lies in the low temperature of the environment, due to which the metabolism proceeds extremely slowly, and the body "wears out" is also an order of magnitude weaker. Hypothetically, an immortal creature living in the depths of the ocean, where there are no natural enemies and changeable currents, can grow indefinitely.
Science knows another type of giants - those who live in the polar regions of the Earth. If Gidora fell into an ice trap, then these amazing creatures are waging a desperate struggle for existence in the waters under the ice cover, where the temperature does not drop below + 4 ° C. For example, most of the sea spiders known to science are barely more than a couple of millimeters in diameter, while native individuals reach the size of a soup bowl! Moreover, because of the monstrous size, they abandon the heart, and the intestines begin to play the role of an organ pushing blood through the vessels.
But even if you imagine a creature with access to unlimited and nutritious food, certain factors will still limit its growth. On land, the most important of these is the strength of the skeleton and joints, which can withstand only a limited load. Even the bones of brachiosaurs and diplodocus did not have infinite strength, and if we add to this numerous environmental factors, from diseases to commonplace old age, the situation becomes even more tense. In addition, due to Earth's gravity, moving a huge body mass requires serious efforts and expenditure of a burst of energy, a source of which in the real wild has always been an extremely scarce resource.
But what if the skeleton is not inside, but outside the body? For example, one of Godzilla's gigantic peers named Mothra is none other than a giant representative of the order of Lepidoptera (and Lepidoptera are included in the insect class). Insects, in turn, belong to invertebrate arthropods and differ from you and me by their exoskeleton - chitinous armor that protects soft, boneless insides from damage and infection. In order to grow, such creatures shed old chitin and, having accumulated a certain amount of calories, quickly increase in size until their body is covered with new protection. Then the cycle repeats and the process happens over and over. That is why they are the first candidates for titans. If such creatures did not die of the pathologies accumulated with age, their sizes would be truly amazing.
It turns out that in the real world there are organisms whose dimensions in the future could approach the size of movie giants. However, this process interferes with their external environment, full of dangers and specific conditions. However, it is possible that at great depths or under the ice of Antarctica such representatives of the fauna are hiding, which science simply does not know about.