Wouldn’t a monster that big have extra large bones and muscles to support all that mass?
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For those asking “what about dinosaurs,” repeatedly, Godzilla is, uh, bigger than a dinosaur.
Have you ever made those marker swords where you make them so long they start to lean until they fall. That is what happens in a way. Your bones are only so strong. Even if you make them really thick it eventually can’t be thick enough to support its own weight.
Something called the “square cube” law. Imagine Godzilla was humanoid instead of reptilian, and 6 feet is a reasonable height for an adult man. If you double a person’s height while keeping the proportions of their body the same, the cross sectional area of the leg bones of a 12 foot tall “giant human” will be 4 times the area of those of a normal person (square of twice the height), while their mass will be 8 times that of a normal human (cube of twice the height), so the stress (force divided by area) on their leg bones will be double that on the leg bones of a normal human.
How big is Godzilla? From the lyrics of the theme song of the Saturday morning cartoon “Godzilla Power Hour”: “Up from the depths, 30 stories high”. Typically a story in a building is 10 feet (8 foot ceiling plus 2 feet of structure). That would make him 300 feet tall, or 50 times as tall as a person. His leg bones would have 2,500 times the area of a person’s (square of 50), but his weight would be 125,000 times that of a person (cube of 50), so the stress in his leg bones would be 50 times that of the stress in a person’s leg bones.
Even King Kong (from the cartoon’s theme song “10 times as big as a man”) would be supporting 1,000 times the weight of a human on leg bones with 100 times the area, for 10 times the stress.
What is the biggest Godzilla could realistically be?
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