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Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Volkobom here.

Godzilla has a remarkable staying power.

Movies about giant monsters were a dime a dozen back in the 1950s, yet while atomic age

classics like the giant claw or the beast from 20,000 bathrooms never garnered any sequels,

Godzilla forged on.

The Kaiju made his cinematic debut in 1954, and since then he starred in more than

30 films spanning six and a half decades, with his newest debuting in March of 2021.

The character's origin story keeps getting rewritten.

He's usually said to be an irradiated beast of prehistoric origins, but the specifics

vary from movie to movie.

One thing that's remained consistent, however, is Godzilla's physical toughness.

On screen, the behemoth is practically invincible, but have you ever wondered how, or if, a beast

with Godzilla's dimensions would function in real life?

And what kind of animal would Godzilla be anyway?

For the article this episode is based on, How Stuff Works spoke with Kenneth Carpenter,

now a retired paleontologist who was director of the Utah State University Eastern Prihistoric

Museum, when How Stuff Works spoke with him by email in 2019.

He took a stab at that second question in a 1998 essay that he wrote for the official

Godzilla Compendium.

Traditionally, the monster has been identified as a Theopod Dinosaur.

All carnivorous dinos, like, for example, Tyranosaurus Rex, are classified as Theopods,

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