Before I saw it, I always assumed it was taken from 'Gorgosaurus'. But in the film, there's the legendary 'Ogra' the kid talks about, and someone mentions the 'Gorgon' in the connection that one of the divers died of fright at the sight of it. All a bit tenuous, and I still think that the producers might have wanted a resonance with the fearsome gorgosaurus, which a) looked nothing like Gorgo, b) Was nowhere near as big as this kaiju sized leviathan, and b) was not aquatic. So that's tenuous as well, despite the unsupported claim that the producers originally wanted to call the film, 'Gorgosaurus'. Incidentally, there is a Kaiju that lives on 'Monster Island' that is called, 'Gorosaurus' and this is close enough to 'gorgosaurus' and the kaiju actually does vaguely resemble a tyrannosaurid.
But what Gorgo really reminded me of was the 'Gorn' in Star Trek. I think that. in reality, 'Gorgo' is one of those words that people use for monsters. It's been used in other horror contexts, such as for some kind of ape. I think that travelling circuses sometime featured a gorilla called, 'Gorgo', and this could have been at the back of their minds, seeing as Gorgo is exhibited in a circus. But I can't be sure of this. I think it is sufficiently close to, 'gargantuan' to have been derived from a truncated version of that, with only a change of vowel. There was also the 'gargan', which featured in 'Teenagers From Outer Space' which was also released as, 'Gargan Terror', and 'gargan' was likely derived from 'gargantuan'. I think it more than likely that the name was plucked out of the air, by analogy with other monsters. We'll probably never know for sure. :)
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