Why king kong cant exist

And while they might no longer carry the cultural cachet of the Avengers, the kings and queens of smashing things up on screen , both creatures have earned their right to a long-awaited showdown in Godzilla vs.

Kong , which hits screens this week. The last time the pair squared off, in the Japanese stop-motion release King Kong vs. Scaling up Kong to match Godzilla makes sense.

It would be a short film if Godzilla stomped the big ape to death in the opening minutes. And, crucially, is any of this based in science?

There are some things the films get right. However, larger creatures need more food and typically reproduce at a slower rate, meaning few individuals can be supported by any one ecosystem. So Kong and Godzilla being the last of their species — and Kong slowly maturing over 40 years — fits the science. Specifically, the laws of gravity and biomechanics. With every meter in height, Bocherens says, we should expect about eight times the volume.

The other reason why Gigantopithecus disappeared off the face of the Earth: humans. One hundred thousand years ago, humans from neighboring islands were probably exploring, came across the gorilla, and either hunted it into oblivion or ensured its starvation. Bocherens, for his part, dismisses and forgives Kong as a purely cinematic trope. Tanya Basu. But could an extraordinarily huge ape ever truly exist? African elephants, for instance, can reach about 13 feet tall and weigh up to 7.

In the past, however, life got far larger: Dinosaurs like the Titanosaur weighed in at nearly 80 tons—10 times larger than the African elephants of today, but still nowhere near as big as the fictional King Kong.

The reason has to do with the fact that dinosaurs were reptiles, and today we live in an age dominated by mammals. To maintain their higher body temperatures, warm-blooded mammals spend about 10 times more energy than cold-blooded reptiles do on their metabolisms.

This is energy that a mammal can't devote to increasing its body size. So it makes sense that the largest mammals we know of are roughly one-tenth as large as the largest reptiles ever found, Smith says.

What about the blue whale, which is believed to be the largest animal to ever exist on Earth, weighing in at more than tons? In water, the rules are different. Water's buoyancy helps support the bodies of sea creatures, taking some of the strain off their muscles and skeletons. Smith says blue whales could theoretically get even bigger than they are presently, but biologists believe that the relatively short gestation period of blue whales for their body size—just 11 months—limits their size.

But there's another major factor that limits an animal's size: food. A ton ape is going to need a lot of food to support itself, and it is not likely to find that amount of food on Skull Island, unless helicopters full of tasty humans crash there regularly. Blue whales swim across ranges of thousands of miles to find krill to eat, and African elephants can cover up to 80 miles in a day looking for vegetation. Large animals tend to get smaller on islands to compensate for the fact that there are usually fewer potential food sources, Payne says, such as the extinct dwarf elephant species that once lived on islands in the Mediterranean Sea.