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Comment by zzzbra | Hacker News Reader

to think that some people called the new godzilla movies dumb…

The idea is that the radioactivity produces Hydrogen and Sulfate, and some bacteria (or achaea?) can "burn" the Hydrogen extracting an Oxygen from the Sulfate. So no Godzilla down there.

Unless there are little animals eating the bacteria, and bigger animals eating them, etc.

I mean it's preposterous, but not impossible if for some reason the rock was porous enough. Maybe inside a small moon or asteroid.

There are also radiotrophic fungi found in Chernobyl like Cryptococcus neoformans. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

I'd like to say "nah", but there is a weird case: "The bizarre beasts living in Romania's poison cave" http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-l... (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11682816 889 points | May 12, 2016 | 163 comments)

Anyway, in this cave there are snails, shrimps, insects and spiders, but not vertebrates.

The larger animals could eat the rocks and specialized cells lining the stomach would be responsible for converting the energy released from the hydrogen sulfide reactions into an energy pathway like our ATP.

You can't have animals with bones when carbon is naturally lacking, which is exactly what the article says: such areas don't have much carbon in the first place.

Wouldn't you need calcium for bones? Or both?

Anyway there are plenty of animals that don't have bones - and there's no reason to assume our chemical kind of bones are the only kind possible. You could maybe have iron bones evolve on some worlds - I don't know of anything that would prohibit that.

Hollow Earth Theory

*Pourous Earth Theory

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