A latest study has found that in case superhero Spider-Man had to climb walls like a true spider, he would have required ridiculously huge feet.

Alike spiders, many critters can scurry up walls, like some species of lizard, beetle and cockroach. However there is a reason why geckos are the biggest animals that can scale walls this way. The researchers said that bigger and heavier animals would require titanic-size sticky footpads to climb tall buildings.

In a statement, study senior author Walter Federle, a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom said, “If a human, for example, wanted to walk up a wall the way a gecko does, we'd need impractically large, sticky feet — our shoes would need to be a European size 145 or a U.S. size 114”.

As per Guinness World Records the man holding the record for largest feet in the world has 26 US shoe size. The researchers said that humans would require adhesive pads covering 40% of their body, or nearly 80% of their front, to climb up a vertical wall.

For investigating this sticky phenomenon, the researchers looked at the weight and footpad size of 225 species of ascending animal. They discovered that bigger animals having ‘sticky’ feet, like geckos, have bigger adhesive footpads as compared to their smaller, sticky-feet peers, like mites and spiders.

The study’s first author David Labonte, a doctoral student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge said that besides the different animals had ‘remarkably similar footpads’.

Labonte mentioned that adhesive pads of climbing animals are a key instance of convergent evolution, where a number of species have independently, via quite different evolutionary histories, reached at the same solution to a problem. He added that occurrence of such a thing is a clear sign that it should be a quite good solution.