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

It would have big bones and muscles, but that only scales so far.

Muscle strength is proportionate to the area of a cross section of the muscle. If you imagined taking a little circular slice of someone’s arm or leg, that’s the cross sectional area. And areas scale as the square of the creatures length as we make it bigger.

Weight, however, scales as the *cube* of the creatures length.

This means that eventually as a creature gets bigger, you can’t give it muscles strong enough to support its weight anymore, because the weight is increasing faster than the muscle strength. Eventually the muscles are *so* big and heavy they wouldn’t even be strong enough to support their own weight, much less the weight of the rest of the body.

This is why tiny creatures like ants are so strong relative to their body weight, and why the biggest creatures are aquatic, where supporting your own weight is much easier.