The Queue: The Emptiness Machine

I apologize for the header image being somewhat washed out, it’s the best I could do with the teaser vid.

I could never winnow down my favorites to a list of five, but I will give you my current five obsessions. This is not a ranked list, they’re all my special babies.

• Maip macrothorax — This member of the Megaraptora is a Coelurosaurid, a Theropod clade most closely related to the Tyrannosauroidea and ranging from South America to Australia and Africa. You know how the Tyrants developed bigger and bigger heads full of massive teeth and jaw muscles that could crush bone and even osteoderms in armor like Ankylosaurs had? To the point where they ended up shrinking their forelimbs? Maip and other Megaraptors went the other way — they grew big hands and arms with massive talons similar to the foot claws on Dromaeosaurs like Utahraptor. They also grew from relatively small ambush predators until Maip here hit 9 meters long and roughly one and a half tons. Some estimates push it to 10 meters and more than double that.
• Ankylosaurus magniventris — Because I want a big tank to ride around on.
• Nyasaurus parringtoni — Nyasaurus is an Avemetatarsalian, the clade that contains all diapsid reptiles more closely related to birds than crocodiles. There’s some debate about whether Nyasaurus is actually a dinosaur — one of the earliest known, at that — or just a dinosauramorph just outside the lineage. But they’re more closely related to Dinosaurs than even the Pterosaurs are, and that’s good enough for me.
• Shantungosaurus giganteus — They don’t call him giganteus for nothing. Estimated to have weighed around 16 tons for the biggest specimens, this is a member of the Hadrosaurs, what we used to call Duckbills. At 16 tons, Shantungosaurus is comparable to a Brontosaurus excelsus, which weighted between 14 and 30 tons as adults. These animals didn’t even need to grow horns or spikes or armor, they were just massive enough that local predators like Tarbosaurus and Zuchengtyrannus knew to pick on the sick or old.
• Zuchengtyrannus magnus — alongside Tarbosaurus bataar this is the largest predator from the Cretaceous of Asia and is estimaged currently to be at least as large as its close relative, 10+ meters and 4 to 5 metric tons. There are rumblings of an upcoming paper that would push Zuchengtyrannus up into the same range as Tyrannosaurus mcraensis or even T.rex itself, but that paper has not yet been published.

I certainly hope so. Preferably on the back of a kaiju.

Dude, do you just hate being able to get to your mail?

Really depends on the Gojira in question. The one who rides in my pocket to the doctor? He’s pretty chill, we chat about all sorts of things. Monsterverse or Showa era? A respectful nod, perhaps a whispered thanks. Shin or Minus One/Zero? Screaming and running away would be the best I could hope for.

The one you showed looks like he might veer more towards the late Heisei, the one that fought Spacegodzilla and saved their kid from a crystal cage. Please note that Gojira junia was not Spacegodzilla’s kid, just Gojira’s. In the Heisei continuity, there were three Gojira — the one from the 1954 movie, a second one who appeared in the first of the Heisei era films in 1983, and Gojira junia who first appeared in 1993 and became the heir to their father in 1995’s Gojira tai Desutoroia.

Okay, I might nerd out if I think Gojira is down for it.

Me too! The last one was in October, next one probably in January of 2027. Not looking forward to it, but so far I can still see well enough to write the Queue.

Oh, and since I just remembered to mention it, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is coming out on November 3.

Maybe I’ll ask Gojira is he can help us kill that big robot from MusedMoose’s question. I’m pretty sure there’s a version of Gojira bigger than that, probably the one from Godzilla Earth.