Godzilla vs Kong? Physics the winner
The latest Hollywood blockbuster asks who would win if Godzilla battled King Kong. To which scientists say: neither. Both would instantly be vanquished by the laws of physics.
Kong has been growing. In King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson in 2005, the ape was 8m tall. In Kong: Skull Island, released in 2017, he had grown to about 30m. In Godzilla vs. Kong, released this week, he appears to be closer to 120m.
For the scientists who decline to suspend their disbelief, Kong’s greatest foe isn’t Godzilla – it’s biomechanics.
‘‘Put it this way: if you were to inflate a gorilla and increase its size – well, he couldn’t stay the same shape,’’ said Professor Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist.
A classic essay by the scientist JBS Haldane explains why, giving the example of a 60 foot (20m) man.
The man would be ten times taller than a normal person but also ten times as wide and ten times as deep. His weight would therefore be about 1000 times that of a 6ft person – 80 or 90 tonnes.
However, the cross-sections of his bones would be only a hundred times greater. ‘‘So that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone,’’ Haldane said. This would be impossible: his legs would snap.
The proportions of Kong, who would have weighed roughly 160 tonnes in his last film, would have to change. ‘‘When you have something like an elephant or a dinosaur, its legs are great, big, thick tree trunks,’’ Dawkins said.
Other hurdles would still stand in the way, however. Dr Susannah Maidment, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, is no Godzilla aficionado. ‘‘Never seen any of the films,’’ she said. ‘‘But the largest dinosaur we have at the moment is an Argentinian sauropod called Patagotitan.’’
These giants – at 37m long and about 60 tonnes – evolved various ways to lighten their skeletons, allowing them to become so big. They had hollow limb bones and air sacs in their vertebrae to keep their weight down.
Modelling that takes into account physical limitations has been done on Tyrannosaurus rex, which grew to be about 12m long. The calculations show that it could not have adopted a running gait. ‘‘Its limb bones would literally have snapped under the force,’’ Maidment said.
It follows that the energetic battles imagined by Hollywood could not happen. ‘‘I’m not sure what Godzilla and King Kong do, but I’m pretty sure there’s some fairly vigorous activity going on that simply wouldn’t have been possible at that size.’’