Could Giant Animals Like Godzilla Ever Exist on Earth?

 Could Giant Animals Like Godzilla Ever Exist on Earth?

Rachmatunnisa - detikInet

Monday, 03 Feb 2025 20:02 WIB

Has an animal as big as a mountain like Godzilla ever lived on Earth? Even dinosaurs were outclassed by it. Photo: Godzilla - 2014 (doc. imdb.)

Jakarta- During the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth, the most gigantic creature created on this planet and surviving until now is the blue whale.

Weighing 150 tons and 30 meters long, the blue whale is truly a giant creature. Has an animal as big as a mountain like Godzilla ever lived on Earth? Even dinosaurs were outclassed by it.

Maximum Cell Growth Size

From small things, big things grow, including single cells of living things. For your information, most self-replicating cells throughout the biosphere can only be seen with the aid of a microscope.

The maximum growth size of a single cell involves various reasons, and all of them are based on principles embedded in chemistry and geometry.

For example, the ratio of an object's surface area to its volume. As 3D objects like cells grow larger, this ratio narrows, meaning the thick fluid in the center expands faster than the outer layers.

Having a smaller surface area per cubic micrometer of the cell is like having a mouth that can’t keep up with the expanding body. The mouth limits the amount of nutrients and essential gases that can cross the boundary to reach the expanding place.

That’s not the only limitation. There’s also the issue of structure. Even large cells need to separate their membranes and DNA at some point if they want to replicate.

The mechanism for this process, for most living things, relies on threadlike structures called microtubules, which act like a scaffolding that gives the cell structure and locomotion. They also help limit cell size.

Of course, evolution can find workarounds to push the boundaries of biotechnology. Take Caulerpa taxifolia . This fast-growing, invasive algae species ignores all the rules of cell theory.

C. taxifolia looks like an aquatic fern.

Although C. taxifolia looks like an aquatic fern with leaves that can reach 80cm in length, it is actually a single giant cell and still has many nuclei, housing a swarm of endosymbiotic bacteria to help it absorb nutrients. So, cells can get very big, if the things that qualify them as cells are met.

Then there is the Lindsey Creek French, a type of coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). This tree is an ancient species that dates back to the beginning of the age of the dinosaurs.

With a volume of 2,550 cubic meters and a height of 118.87 meters, it went down in the history books as the largest tree ever. Unfortunately, a storm destroyed it in 1905. If it were still around, the Lindsey Creek French might still be the king of plants today.

To support such a large mass and reach such incredible heights, redwoods have developed a few tricks to overcome limitations. One of the limitations of plant size is that it channels water from underground to the top.

Giant redwoods

With complex genomes that allow them to grow taller over centuries, withstanding disease outbreaks and occasional fires with relative ease, redwoods seem to have been able to slowly rise to the top.

Nature may one day produce a sky-scraping tree, but it probably won’t happen anytime soon. Even ancient redwoods may have already gone extinct as climate change reduces moisture and threatens forests with hotter fires.

Godzilla-Sized Animals

The challenges of growing a skyscraper plant seem modest compared to growing a mountain-sized animal like the sci-fi Godzilla.

The largest land animals we ever knew belonged to the sauropod branch of the dinosaur family tree, huge four-legged beasts with long necks balanced by long tails that could exceed 40 meters (130 feet) and weigh up to 70 tons.

How much more? When an animal doubles in size, its mass increases eightfold. Its bones need to develop ways to support this extra weight off the ground, such as increasing their density, and its muscles then need to pull it around. This not only requires more energy, but also puts extra stress on the heart and lungs.

The sauropod body seems efficient because it made good use of its plant-based diet, allowing its rotating head to forage while its body remained in place.

Spinosaurus size comparison with modern humans.

The largest carnivorous dinosaurs were probably not much bigger than spinosaurus either. At 15 to 16 meters long, these large predators seem to have preferred to float in rivers and wait for large fish to pass by.

Later, whale species evolved