Yeah, I'm not going to try and defend the 280 ton number. I'm not throwing it out there to say that it's actually a Godzilla sized creature's weight. In fact, just between this post and the last, I started to look up estimated weights of animals at various heights, and 400 tons seems like a commonly used number for a 100 foot creature, though I imagine the 'margin of error' on such estimates is pretty large.
The actual weight is less important than the fact that the article was using easy to criticize comic book stats to make points, rather than being fair minded about it's argument. That's more what bothered me about it than anything else.
As far as the 'Square/Cube' law is concerned, I understand the general principle, that volume grows faster than area as an object gets bigger.......but it only works in predictable ratios if you know the density of the material you are working with. So it would only give you an exact estimated weight if you knew the density of the animal which was getting bigger. Which, the main part of my first post in the thread was the density is incredibly variable based on what type of animal, with a very wide possiblity of functional ranges.
That, and while I don't actually know the FORMULA itself, I am heavily skeptical that it would spit out a number of 20,000 tons, even if you did use the density of an animal like a crocodile or a person, sprouted up to 350 feet. Maybe it would....but I doubt it.
