Could dragons really exist?

I am loving this thread!

A nice idea but I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this one. The swim bladder of a fish usually contains oxygen, nitrogen or carbon dioxide which they obtain from water. These are all less dense than water so can provide buoyancy.

On land oxygen and carbon dioxide are both denser than air and nitrogen only slightly lighter so couldn't be used to provide lift.

Methane could be a candidate but it's only about half as dense as air so you'd need a lot of it, while Helium and hydrogen could also be used, but are only present in minute quantities. Even if it could produce one of those gases itself, it would have to have a huge storage organ.

I found the below chart that calculates dragon weight based on length (nice to see we're not the only one's this interested in the subject). A 32ft dragon weighing 5.8t would need to hold 5300 m³ of hydrogen, 5700m3 of helium or 11,200m3 of methane to gain lift. Even if it only needed a half of that to achieve flight it would still need a storage organ at least the the size of a hot air balloon. Even a small 8ft, 90kg dragon would need to store over 80m3.

Never thought I'd be going this in-depth on a dragons ability to fly, but makes a lovely change from the usual AIBUs.

Are you new to MN?

But an adapted digestive system storing gas could overcome the size/mass problem - similar to swim bladders in fish.

Hm... the gas would presumably be methane (afaik there aren't biochemical processes which liberate lots of hydrogen).
So we're looking at a herbivore which burps rather than farts (excepting my namesake, obviously).

I can hear my mother now... 'we haven't time for idle conjecture!'... (assume a very cold, snotty tone there...).

I'm off down a rabbit hole of sea-monsters, trying to work out if any of them are based on anything other than giant/collossal squid, as it seems most are.

Fun sponge 😁

Gosh, is it a full moon? There are several totally bonkers threads on here atm.

Completely agree would have to be four limbs, so wings are adapted forelegs (like bats). But an adapted digestive system storing gas could overcome the size/mass problem - similar to swim bladders in fish.

(You’ve all probably guessed I’m a science nerd, for which I refuse to apologise!)

I believe that myths and legends there is always some truth to them

Could dragons that look exactly like some of the art we see today exist, with wings and four legs and so on...

No.

Could dragons as a concept have come about as misunderstood re-tellings of stories about real creatures and also fossil remains ... yes absolutely.

Humans have an inherent need to tell stories, to pass information in that form, which is why we still go to see plays (even plays we've seen before or read and know the whole story) and watch dramas on tv and read books and watch films..

Its why forums exist, we're all telling stories, some truer than others.

When those stories can only be passed on by telling and listening rather than writing down and then later, by poorly translating loose written language, those stories change, details are fudged..

Humans also like to embellish. Its got to be bigger and better and more ferocious and terrifying, we like to add detail that may not be strictly necessary, or accurate.

Historically, when we've depicted anything with images, we've embellished it, from Lord Thingies cows and horses that were far taller or fatter or more magnificent than their real life counter parts, to Joe the Sailors sea-monster, which swelled to 100s of feet longer and bigger and more vicious than the stinking remains of the collossal squid he saw washed up on a beach...

It isn't hard to see how stories grow and details are mixed with misunderstandings.

One person describes a huge reptile, explains that you don't want to get the animals saliva on you as it burns when it gets into an open wound (which you naturally have if you wrestled it to the ground)... becomes another persons 'it breathes fire'..

And like every angler who ever caught a tiddler that became a whale by the time he got home... all these things were significantly larger in the retelling of the tale.

DNA tests suggest you are wrong. Most British people do not have Viking/nordic ancestors

I've got a mate who talks shite too. Good fun though.

🐉

of course.

Surely you mean The Documentary 1 million years BC?

Have you not see the film "1 Million Years BC"?

https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/dragons/id1537788786?i=1000659200634]]

Well that be a great theory but of course the gas you can get out of limestone is carbon dioxide so this putative dragon could only serve as a fire extinguisher, not a flamethrower.😂

I think that Grendel is actually the result of The King getting jiggy with something that may have been a dragon of some kind (in disguise one hopes).
Its probably allegorical

In short, no, dragons (with four legs and two wings) couldn't exist from a biological standpoint. All terrestrial vertebrates evolved from a lobed-finned fish with four limbs. For a creature to spontaneously evolved another pair of limbs would be a huge evolutionary jump that we have never seen.

Wyverns (two legs and two wings), on the other hand, are more plausible. Creatures like Quetzalcoatlus show that large, winged vertebrates existed. However, a real wyvern wouldn’t resemble the traditional fantasy depiction. It would need to be much smaller and lighter to achieve flight.

Many modern-day descendants of Vikings have a long tradition of story-telling.
Its difficult to imagine that the truth was passed down exactly for generations, or that people with an aptitude for entertainment and drama didn’t add their own spin onto these stories when telling them to people, E.g. their children, to keep them amused. Some children would have relayed these ales with their own embellishments, I’m sure!
Beowulf is one such story - pretty sure that among all the “normal” drama of family fallouts and wars, there is a monster - Grindel rings a bell…

There was an amazing cartoon in the 80s where the dragons fly by eating limestone and swallowing gems (treasure hoarding) to break the limestone up in the stomach and creating hydrogen gas. The gas made them fly like a blimp, and they breathed it out to come down.

Yes dragons are real!

I've always loved dragons and I love how every culture has its own 'dragon' specific to the region. As pp's have noted in most cultures they don't fly, thats very much the western dragon.

I'm sure fossils have played a big part in shaping the myths, but how complete is the fossil record? Fossils only form in specific environments, I doubt what we have seen is even 10% of the wildlife that existed at those time points.

Ah they’ll be the Vikings that settled in Scotland rather than Wales then ;)

He has posted before, unfortunately he may well be real
Americans innit