Japanese monster artists have created a vast menagerie of crazy creatures (or Kaiju 怪獣). the beloved Godzilla being a most notable specimen.
Godzilla/Gojira has always been a bad-ass, with her ability to breath fire, or breath ice, be radioactive, shoot lasers from her eyes, and various other things besides (depending on what model year we are talking). But if she eats some bad shrimp, does she get a stomachache like I do? Does she even have a stomach?
Where fantasy meets the possibility of reality and myth finds embodiment is the place where a monster’s monsterful anatomy might also be imagined, and in detail. Every cause has an effect, as modern science has taught us, so it is only fair that some odd organs should underlie what otherwise would seem to be “super”natural abilities:
Godzilla’s purported ability to move her limbs with the complex grace beyond that of a Shaolin monk or drummer Buddy Rich, for example? Well, according the the anatomy chart here, we can leave that to the two subsidiary nerve ganglia in her that work like two “sub-brains” to process all that muscle control - one for the arms and one for the legs, respectively. What I love about this is that even in such a fiction lies the fact that many insects are built in just such a neurologically distributed way. When it comes to science, perhaps the matters of "fiction" and "non-fiction" are fuzzy at best...
A glimpse at some more Japanese monster anatomy charts can be found here.
Better still, the old-school Leuckhart charts
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2 comments:
Unlike other tetrapods, Godzilla has twin proximal limb bones where we just have a boring femur. This would allow it to rotate its foot 360°. It would be an interesting anatomy exercise to get students to come up with names for these hitherto-undescribed bones...
Thanks for your expertise of this! Now I'm wondering if Gojira actually put this extra foot rotation into play - perhaps in doing card tricks for Mothra?
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