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RandomFactor writes:

A recent article explores Godzilla's physical growth over his big screen career (the longest in world cinema history).

Godzilla was born out of climate change in his native deep sea environment caused by nuclear testing at the Bikini Atoll in the 1950's and quickly rose to prominence on the big screen becoming the lead actor in a series of movies that continues to this day. The supersized saurian was finally granted citizenship in his longtime stomping grounds four years ago and employed as a "tourism ambassador."

Gozilla's rise in film has been accompanied by amazing physical growth at a rate 30 times faster than any creature on Earth.

When the dinosaur-like monster debuted on the silver screen in 1954, he stood a towering 164 feet (50 meters) tall. Now, 35 films later — the latest, "Godzilla: King of the Monsters," came out Friday (May 31) — the behemoth has more than doubled in size, currently reaching 393 feet (120 m) tall.

Researchers explored and dismissed various causes for this growth, including speculation that:

Godzilla is a ceratosaurid, a type of dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period. But even though these dinosaurs evolved to have huge bodies, Godzilla's growth spurt far outpaces theirs, the researchers said. The monster's growth is also far too rapid to come from genetic drift, that is, when certain gene variants in a small population are randomly lost, diminishing genetic diversity, the researchers said.

Even natural selection, by which organisms with advantageous genes survive and then pass those genes on to their offspring, couldn't explain Godzilla's swift sprouting.

Researchers finally came to the conclusion that the societal fear and angst might be fueling the largish lizard's growth:

a look at Godzilla's history explains his accelerated growth, the researchers said. Godzilla was created, in part, because of nuclear-age fears following the use of the first atomic and hydrogen bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. In Godzilla's case, hydrogen-bomb testing decimated his deep-sea ecosystem in the first movie, and Godzilla exacted his revenge by destroying Tokyo.

To test the idea that anxiety fueled Godzilla's growth, the researchers used U.S. military spending as a proxy for the nation's collective anxiety. They found a strong correlation between this spending and Godzilla's body size from 1954 to 2019, which includes measurements from both Japanese and American movies.

[coefficient of determination (r^2) = 0.74].

Of course the researchers are quick to point out that

correlation doesn't imply causation. And it is possible that another factor, such as people's appetite for big and scary monsters drove movie makers to grow Godzilla, to ensure box office success.

Original Submission