re: The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
I'm almost sure Isaac Asimov wrote something like this years ago, but if you want to find my upper limit for doing research, it's probably finding a particular science fact article by Asimov among about forty million of them. The man was frigging brilliant, and I have a huge stack of his non-fiction stuff.
I did a quick look through my own books. If you want to read something spooky, try his "No More Ice Ages" from about 1958.