Did dinosaurs really scratch?

I love one aspect of the predatory dinosaur that I have not seen mentioned in the literature: before the fight, you see him scratching (or her? Females might have been larger and more fit to fight Kong). This scratching is a genial idea from the animators and forced me to ask if dinosaurs could scratch. Impossible to know? Actually not, and here I got my answer from famous ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz: scratching with a limb is a useful stereotyped behavior that appeared in our evolutionary time long before dinosaurs, with the first amphibians (Lorenz & Leyhausen, 1971). Why was it scratching? Perhaps because of the mosquitoes that I mentioned earlier?

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989). Source: http://www.dabase.org/lorenz.htm

Birds in the Sumatra region are nearly three times as diverse as reptiles, so there probably were many species on Skull Island, but even though we listen to them we only get to see a few types:  some flying around when they reach the island, one that flies scared from a nest when Kong is about to place Ann on it (I could not identify this bird) and the vultures that fly above and feed on the Tyrannosaurus carcass.

Vultures flying above. Source: http://kingkong.wikia.com

I have a question for next week: why the dinosaurs did not suffer the size reduction typical of originally large animals when they colonize small islands?

Wrong for a century: King Kong never fought a T Rex!

The most memorable dinosaur from King Kong may be the Tyrannosaurus that he wrestles. The reptile was also correct according to the knowledge available at the time, with scales instead of feathers. According to audio commentary by Ray Harryhausen in the DVD edition of the film, it was not a Tyrannosaurus but an Allosaurus, but I will keep calling it Tyrannosaurus because the model was not anatomically detailed and because a Tyrannosaurus is what most people think they are watching.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

There is also a scene in which a pterosaur captures Ann but has difficulties taking flight with its heavy load, actually an impossible task for such an animal (the same error appears in 2015’s Jurassic World). If you pay attention you will notice that even though scientifically wrong, the scene recorded the beauty of Fay Wray’s legs for history.

Source: http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/

I can imagine the plesiosaurs (from 66 million years before present, mybp) swimming to the island and the pterosaurs (from 80 mybp) reaching it on the wing, but the question of how the dinosaurs could have reached the island if this were a true story forced me to check the paleomaps for the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods. The Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus lived up to 150 mybp in the northern landmass of the time, so theoretically they could have walked to the area, but the Tyrannosaurus lived on a giant North American island 66 mybp so I see no feasible way for the carnivore to reach Skull Island, despite the land connections imagined by Valdron (2005). If you take Harryhausen’s statement that it was meant to be an Allosaurus, the problem disappears and its arrival is believable.

Source: http://bumbletubclub.blogspot.com/

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.