In the movie "Godzilla II: King of the Monsters", 17 monsters appeared in the world, and in addition to Godzilla, there were classic monsters such as Mothra, Raton and Ghidorah in the movie, so that monster fans were a feast for the eyes, and even many classic movie soundtracks also met the fans' perception experience. But are these monster-level creatures really found in paleontological fossils? Let's find out!
Godzilla poster
Picture from: Douban
Is Godzilla a dinosaur?
Godzilla's Japanese word "ゴジラ" is a combination of whale (クジラ) and gorilla (ゴリラ), symbolizing the sheer size of the former and the strength of the latter. Although the name comes from two species of mammals, the large-tailed and bipedal walking postures are significantly closer to the carnivorous theropod dinosaurs.
There have been many different images of Godzilla in past films, such as the earliest film considering it to be a "transitional taxa from aquatic reptiles to terrestrial beasts"; later it was said that it was a dinosaur mutation called "Godzilla dragon". Interestingly, there is a dinosaur in the Triassic strata of New Mexico in the United States named "Gojirasaurus" in honor of Godzilla; it is sometimes said to be the god of the sea, WuErluo (Godzilla is pronounced in Japanese for Chinese characters).
Gojirasaurus
Figure from: Network
So, in terms of body size alone, is there really a carnivorous dinosaur that can be compared with Godzilla? In fact, carnivorous theropod dinosaurs needless to say, because bipedal walking will be limited by weight, the largest carnivorous dinosaur is the 15-meter Spinosaurus (Spinosaurus), the most well-known Tyrannosaurus rex is about 12 meters, plus these dinosaurs are bent over the posture, the height of up to one or two floors, really can not be compared with Godzilla shoulder to shoulder with the building. Of course, if meat is eaten aside, some records of sauropods may barely match the magnitude of the Titan Behemoth.
The largest sauropod dinosaur in legend is amphicoelias fragilimus, although only a broken vertebrae have been found, but according to the fossil record, this vertebra alone is 2.7 meters, estimated to be up to 80 meters long, and weighs as much as the heaviest animal ever known - the blue whale. But why is it "legendary"? Because the fossil disappeared after the publication of the paper in 1870, there is only one sketch in existence, and many scholars doubt that this figure or the scale on it is credible. At present, the most credible sauropod dinosaur is Argentinosaurus , with a length of more than 40 meters , but the necks of such dinosaurs and diplodocus extend forward , so in terms of height , it is still a neck upwards such as brachiosaurus or Sauroposeidon , which is 5 to 6 stories high. But whatever it is for Godzilla, it is still a small witch.
Can Raton really take off?
Although Raton is jokingly referred to as a bird in the film, there is no doubt that the setting is a pterosaur, and the name is derived from the combination of Ra and don of "Pteranodon". In the movie, Raton's wingspan is 265 meters, which is extremely spectacular. Although fossil excavations so far have not reached this magnitude, the large pterosaurs found so far are still enough to be breathtaking.
Rodan
Pterodactyls were close relatives of dinosaurs, both living in the Mesozoic Era, and by the late Cretaceous period, pterosaurs of the Azhdarchidae family evolved amazingly large, such as Quetzalcoatlus, one of the largest pterosaurs to date. The wingspan of the Aeolian Pterodactyl can reach 10 to 15 meters, which is at least 10 times larger than the largest bird today, and stands up as tall as a giraffe. It is considered to be the limit of the size of flying animals, after all, there are still many aerodynamic and anatomical limitations on take-off, and raton's size of life should be able to fly by divine power, don't be too real.
In fact, there is still controversy about whether the Wind God Pterodactyl can fly. If you use its forelimb wingspan to estimate the weight it can bear, this giraffe is generally tall and weighs only 62 to 136 kilograms, but the muscle density of this organism is only 0.25g/cm³, which is really light and exaggerated compared to our density of about 1g/cm³. Therefore, in 2010, two groups of scholars also made weight estimates for the bones of Aeolian pterosaurs, but due to the different calculation formulas and methods they used, the results of the two were also very different. One team calculated a weight of 200 to 250 kilograms, which they thought would be able to take off, while the other team estimated 500 kilograms and said that the half-ton creature could not go to heaven and should be a terrestrial animal.
Aeolian pterosaurs compared to giraffes and human bodies
Regardless of whether this creature can take off, based on experiments with anatomical structures and wind tunnel models, scholars have learned that the forelimbs of pterosaurs, although highly efficient, could not fly at high speeds like birds and resist turbulence, and they were more adapted to low-speed flight. Therefore, the scene in the movie in which Raton chases the fighter is about the second miracle that he can fly in this shape after the pterosaur.
Has moth moth ever existed?
Moths and butterflies belong to the order Lepidoptera, which appeared relatively late in terms of insects, probably originating in the late Triassic period when dinosaurs rose. There are no records of particularly large Lepidoptera insects in fossils, and the largest of the living taxa is the emperor moth with a wingspan of 30 cm. The emperor moth is found in southern China, Taiwan, and Southeast and South Asia, which is also quite in line with the setting of Mothra's presence in Yunnan.
Mothra in C
Mothra
Although there are no giant moths, push the time back to the Paleozoic Carboniferous and Permian, when there were indeed many large bugs, such as the ancestor of the 2-meter centipede and the 70-centimeter large scorpion, and when it comes to flying, the 75-centimeter wingspan of the giant-veined dragonfly was the fiercest aerial predator at the time.
Why were there great insects in ancient times and none in today?
There are two main arguments at present. The first is that because of the abundance of oxygen on land at that time, carboniferous carbon in the Carboniferous period represented coal formed by many plant fossils in the strata of this period, which also represented that there were rich forests at that time to create oxygen. The insect's breathing mode is more passive, so the body shape is greatly affected by the oxygen concentration, and the rich oxygen can also allow the dragonfly to press down more air to get buoyancy as soon as it flaps its wings. The second theory is that it was because the vertebrates had just landed, and the lack of predators on land allowed the insects to be so overbearing, and when the vertebrates were better adapted to land life, the larger the insects provided at best more abundant delicacies.
Giant insects of the Carboniferous Period
What is Ghidorah doing in Antarctica?
Ghidorah is Godzilla's strongest opponent and the largest. It is difficult to give a definitive answer to what kind of creature Ghidorah is, and its shape is a vivid use of the method of creating monsters. In general, the image of a monster or monster is done by means of size (in addition to enlargement, sometimes also by zooming in, such as elves or dwarves), adding or subtracting organs, and fusing multiple biometrics. Ghidorah is the largest, with three heads and two tails, a dragon head, a long neck, wings, and scales, and can be said to be the master of monsters.
Ghidorah
Incidentally, one of the notable features of Ghidorah is its large and long neck, and the creature with the longest neck in history is actually in China, which was found in Sichuan, Mamenxi Dragon, a dinosaur with a total length of 22 meters and an 11 meters long neck alone. Like sauropods, the long neck will sacrifice the size of the head, otherwise the burden of the cervical spine will be too heavy, for example, our current large head is easy to cause cervical spine disease, not to mention that there is a large neck of more than ten meters or even tens of meters long, so although Ghidorah's body is much larger than Godzilla, the head is relatively small.
Kirado vs. Godzilla
Another interesting point is the way Ghidorah moves this time, because it used to be a human wearing a doll suit, so it was two feet on the ground, but this time it moved more according to the pattern of the creature, referring to the posture similar to the auxiliary movement of the forelimbs of bats and pterosaurs. If you look closely at its wings, you can also find that its wings are different from birds, closer to pterosaurs, bats or some dinosaurs that are good at climbing birds (yes, that is, you, the mixed element dragon on the cover of nature magazine), relying on elongated wing fingers and wing membranes to fly, it is no wonder that the film uses the form of pterosaurs and bats more than the walking style of birds.
Paleontology and monster images
For monsters or monster image creation, it is difficult to get rid of our existing knowledge of the natural world and create an unseen creature out of thin air, just as we cannot imagine a color that has never been seen before. Therefore, the rich foundation of paleontology makes today's film fantasies have such colorful monster images. In addition, other monsters such as gimmoths and ancient spiders can also be seen in the movie.
The ammonite beast in Pokémon (also known as Pokemon) is derived from the ancient creature "Ammonite".
The fossil helmet in Pokémon (also translated as Pokémon) is derived from the ancient creature Trilobite.
In ancient mythology, there are actually many monsters that may be from fossils, for example, the ancient Greeks were not familiar with elephants, so when the ancient elephant skull fossils were unearthed, they in addition to imagining it as a giant, they even used the towering nostrils as eye sockets to imagine the Cyclops; the source of the griffin may be the Middle East explorers in the boasting, the "restoration" of the protohornosaurus, its beak into a parrot's mouth, limbs with the body of the beast, shoulder blades into wings Dragons are also thought to have been imagined by fossils of fusion dinosaurs or many other creatures.
Movie "Megalodon"
Although as mentioned earlier, human beings cannot create creatures out of thin air, so far, there is actually a lot of imagination space that can be exhausted. On the one hand, in addition to the fact that there are many new creatures or paleontology that are constantly being explored, on the other hand, our scientific efforts. For example, in the paleontological community, dinosaurs are the most well-known, so we can see that the images of many monsters are integrated with many dinosaur elements, but in fact, the paleontological world is not only so, such as Sharovipteryx( which used to glide with long legs), the spiral-shaped spiny tooth shark with fangs in the jaw, the clawed beasts that are obviously strange-hoofed grasses (such as horses, rhinos, tapirs, etc.) but have pointed claws, and when it comes to the Cambrian outbreak, there are all kinds of strange creatures. Such as the hallucigenia (hallucigenia) that confuses scholars up and down, the Opabinia with five eyes and a long mouth. If you can fuse the image of these incredible creatures in the fantasy of the future movie, there will be more amazing creatures, and it is also expected that the future paleontology can have more amazing discoveries to expand the space of everyone's imagination of the world.
Source: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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