Wrong, King Kong did not fight a snake!

In the 1933 movie King Kong, Skull Island was populated by dinosaurs from a large time span (Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, Tyrannosaurus), an unidentified iguana-like reptile, a plesiosaur −often mistaken for a snake−, a pterosaur and birds. 

Some herbivores like the gorilla and the Stegosaurus appear to behave incorrectly by eating meat (i.e. humans) but a closer look will show that they use their teeth to kill the victims but do not actually swallow them. This shows knowledge and care by the animators. 

The plesiosaur belonged to a marine group that could swim to any distant landmass, the only question about how it got to the island is how it reached the pond near the volcano. The script only calls for “a monster” (Dohm, 2007) so it was the film staff that chose a marine reptile. 

They probably were unaware of the problems that freshwater brings for marine animals (as cleverly mentioned by Silverberg in Haber, 2005), but you can also defend their choice by suggesting that perhaps not all plesiosaurs were marine, or that the water in the mountain top is just the remaining of a marine ecosystem lifted by tectonic activity. In any case, the plesiosaur defends itself from Kong by constricting its neck around him, like a snake, something we now know that was not possible, but fully in agreement with paleo-illustrator Charles R. Knight’s reconstruction at the time (Everhart, 2002).

Source: californiaherps.com

It's a plesiosaur, not a snake!

This old reconstruction also shows plesiosaurs with very flexible necks:

Hawkins (1840). Source: Wikipedia.
 
A newer version reflects the more complete fossil record we now have, but still the neck, seen in isolation, resembles a snake:



Plesiosaur reconstruction by Adam S. Smith, 2002. Source: Wikipedia.  

The Brontosaurus (or Apatosaurus, see Choi, 2015) in the movie drags its tail, and this was correct according to scientific knowledge at the time. But it also walks well on land, which was believed impossible at the time: the artistic need for a chase forced the artists to ignore the belief of early paleontologists, and predated current reconstructions of large herbivorous dinosaurs, which could advance at good speed on land (Haber, 2005).
The Brontosaurus about to kill a poor man with its jaws, not "about to eat him":

Source: 21essays.blogspot.com

In our next post, we will continue to see what was right and wrong in King Kong's 1933 dinosaurs.


Kong also met this nice stegosaur, a dinosaur that I have loved since childhood because of its spectacular set of back plates. 
Source: donglutsdinosaurs.com

Was King Kong constantly hungry?

My calculations tell me that he had to be hungry: the island could not produce enough food for Kong.

Source: flickodyssey.wordpress.com

Here I explain why:
Ewalt (2005) calculated that Kong would need 3 400 kg of food per day. A normal gorilla needs 3 km² of territory, and Kong, 100 times heavier, would require 300 km², probably too much for the island we see in the map (even if we do not consider the fact that at some time there had to be more gorillas; shown only in the 2005 version).

We could try to solve this by saying that the natives fed Kong, but again, even if he ate the poor sacrificial victims, there was not enough nourishment there.

  
No hypothetical changes in Kong’s diet or the plants around him can make their populations viable on an island small enough to be missed by cartographers in the early twentieth century.

But certainly Kong could have bitten anything he wanted, look at what is inside the mouth of a male gorilla:

Source: wikipedia.org

And finally, the food topic brings me to the question: 
Why did the natives offer Kong women: did he eat them as a diet supplement?

We'll see the answer in the next post.