What do people mean when they say that a giant monster like Godzilla would “collapse under the weight of itself?”

Question

Wouldn’t a monster that big have extra large bones and muscles to support all that mass?

In: 1458

Answer 1

Imagine you are playing with blocks, and you want to make a block that’s twice as big. You stack 2 blocks, doubling the height, but you also need to double the width and the depth. You end up using 8 blocks total. A 2x2x2 cube.

A cube that is 2x as tall has 8x the mass…

A cube that is 10x as tall has 1000x the mass…

The same applies to bones. If you scaled up a lizard to 10x the size, keeping the proportions the same, its bones would be 1000x heavier, but only 10x as thick… they would be 10x stronger, but have to support 1000x more weight.

The bones would need to be made out of something stronger than bone.

Edit: /u/go_half_the_way makes a good point. The bones would be 100x as strong, not 10x as strong.