There are a lot of types of dragons out there; you'll have to specify what they look like (how big are they? Can they fly? Do they spit fire?)
At the most general I can say that the existence of dinosaurs and bombardier beetles proves that they can exist under realistic biology rules. Sometimes you'd need a slightly different, but still physical, planet.
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Jun 15th 2023 at 8:04:14 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
(I'm presuming for the moment that mystical, magical, or otherworldly elements are disallowed for the purposes of this thread; if I'm wrong, please correct me!)
Flight would be tricky, as a classic dragon would appear to carry a lot of mass. Offhand, you might end up either:
- Making them less massive
- (Which is not all that inconsistent with pre-modern-fantasy dragons, I think)
- Finding a significant amount of buoyancy for them
- i.e. Filling a significant amount of internal space with lighter-than-air gas
- (Although I'm not sure that this is actually feasible, without someone doing the maths)
- Or giving them something very thick to "fly" through
(Or some combination of the above, of course.)
As mentioned above, fire-breathing is likely not impossible, and might be chemical in origin. (Maybe ignited by a small bioelectric spark—or even just on contact with air.)
Treasure-hoarding... Well, that may depend on whether the dragon is intelligent or not:
If they're intelligent, then they might simply be greedy—or have thriving trade amongst themselves.
If they're not intelligent, then they might just have a magpie's eye for shiny things.
Alternatively, whether intelligent or not, maybe they have some biological use for precious metals—perhaps those migrate to their scales to produce mating displays, or some such thing.
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 16th 2023 at 10:06:33 AM
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Flight is easier than a lot of people presume - the maximum size of a flying animal scales roughly linearly with atmospheric pressure. As in, N times Earth's atmospheric pressure means N times the same dimension or N3 the body volume. However, food/energy needs increase with the body volume!
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Which is essentially what I was getting at with "something very thick to 'fly' through", I think.
But the thing is, one might not want a thicker atmosphere for a given work, especially if it's significantly thicker—that would, I imagine, have potential implications for other species. (Such as humans.)
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 16th 2023 at 11:47:57 AM
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The biggest issue for humans is that certain gases can reach toxic partial pressures. You can bump atmospheric pressure to 18 times that of Earth solely by adding helium (the least toxic gas) but afterwards nitrogen narcosis becomes an issue. OTOH, I don't think that viscosity and drag become a problem until much larger pressures. There are also climatic effects of dense atmospheres, and if you use helium or hydrogen, stability considerations.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Like reflections in the glass!
Correct, though I'm willing to make an exception for cases if the explanations seems like something that could plausibly happen in mundane earth
'fraid not I'm aware that there is a large amount of diversity with regards of creatures with the label (beginning with the common western version and more serpentine eastern versions) and tried to account for them in the OP. But that said I do want to focus on mythical depictions first and the branch off into offshoots later.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 16th 2023 at 7:17:18 AM
The main thing is what do they eat? Large carnivores require a lot of body mass. The largest whales rely on large quantities of krill, T-Rex had very large herbivores to prey upon. What do dragons eat?
And then from there reverse engineering the entire eco-system.
Forgive me, it may be my current tiredness, but this statement confuses me: By "mundane earth" I imagine that you mean "an Earth postulated to have nothing supernatural or magical", in which case how could there be something "mystical, magical, or otherworldly" in it to make an exception of...?
Could you clarify, please?
Would things like the greater pressure from the air-column, or increased difficulty with respiration, not potentially be issues too?
Either way, I'll confess that it seems dubious to me that increasing the density of Earth's atmosphere would have little-to-no effect on the non-draconic biosphere. Surely it would affect, if not humans, then other creatures—insects might take advantage of it to become huge again; I would think that small mammals might struggle with it; etc. etc.
But I do stand to be corrected!
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 16th 2023 at 6:01:50 PM
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From what I know, the chemical effects kick in before the mechanical ones, at least for most compositions. There are also compensation effects - if you slightly increase oxygen concentrations you don't need to breathe as much - but mind that oxygen becomes toxic rather quickly.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Not having enough food would explain why dragons hibernate so much. They've got to let the local biome recover between feedings.
All right, fair enough!
Would we not at least expect some larger bugs, however, and knock-on effects on the food-chain from that?
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Like reflections in the glass!
@Ars. As an attempt of clarification. Yea that is what I mean by mundane earth. I was attempting to refer to some of the more overly supernatural aspects of Dragons. The things associated with them that are usually handwaved as magical beyond stuff like fire breath. Such as immortality or the ability to transform into humans
Sorry for the confusion. I'll admit that in hindsight that does sound redundant.
Arthropod sizes are limited by the amount of oxygen in the air, since their respiratory systems scale poorly with size. Beyond that, the main thing governing animal size is food availability (which limits animal largeness) and predatory pressure (which limits animal smallness). Gravity, atmospheric density etc. only matter at the extremes.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Fair enough—I think that I understand your parameters now! ^_^
Wikipedia seems to suggest otherwise: in the article on Meganeura
, while oxygen density is mentioned, so too is atmospheric density. They say:
(It does also go on to mention other hypotheses regarding their size, including a lack of predators and developing size in adulthood as a means of combatting the high oxygen levels.)
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Like reflections in the glass!
Alright I'm gonna attempt to apply speculative biology to Weredragons to prove a point. Namely that even something that fantastical can work as long as you kill the wizard (as in further clarification to my previous post basically). And also because I have been thinking about the topic for a bit and want to contribute something to the discussion I started.
This post would be influenced by two specific works. Fire Emblem and the lesser known Dragon Star Varnir. With that said it is best to explain what concepts we're working with.
Ahem. Fire Emblem is well known for the Manaketes, Dragonic entities that can take the form of humans (usually girls. Mostly green haired ones at that) the original setting, Archenaea, had established that these Manaketes were the result of dragons sealing their powers to avoid cognitive decay and madness. And similar ideas made it to subsequent settings in some form.
Varnir's case is the reverse, in that the Weredragons in question (dubbed Witches) were originally human and the transformation entails the unlucky victims would inevitably grow mad and transform into dragons permanently. (From what I gather there is a lesser Draconic Humanoid in between form, but that seems to be played for fanservice and Super Mode), the metamorphosis can be stalled by consumption of dragon meat or blood.
Now that we established that. I'm gonna be clear that genetic modification is prolly the likeliest method for transforming a human into a dragon or making a dragon humanoid. This I think still falls into the purview of spec-bio given how the human offshoots in All Tomorrows came to be. That is to say it is something that is unlikely to occur naturally.
With that in mind, these hybrids would have both a mix of human and animal DNA, the latter would likely be sourced from reptiles and maybe avians such as birds (for the wings and Dinosaurs Are Dragons connection) and bats (as Dragonic wings seem to be modeled on those specifically).
The mechanic of mode changing are more complicated but I presume that it would entail a modular skeletal structure that can shift to and from bipedal to saurian.
The aspect of madness (optional, but something I want to address since it is relevant in both mentioned games) would actually be the easiest to justify as there is an existing real life precedent in the form of the Lyssa virus, better known as rabies. Going back to gene mods, I think a strain of the virus could be made to also incur the metamorphosis. This would mean that the infected would have it in their flesh and blood (which incidentally brings to mind how dragon blood catalyzes dracothropy in cases like Final Fantasy XIV). It also means that these dracothropes might be immune to such a strain and retain sentience.
The last thing I want to address, how human would the human half would look. I think that it would depend on how advanced the gene mods are, but I think the most likely answer is that they are gonna be Draconic Humanoids. More like scalies, than like mostly hairless apes basically.
That is all. Is there anything I missed with the concept?
Bonus topic, how would one think the Reverse Scale (aka a "gekirin"), as in a specific scale that is a dragon's literal Berserk Button would work?
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 17th 2023 at 2:27:41 AM
I recommend the show Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real. It's a great insight to dragon biology and anatomy. ![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Fixed the typo in the thread title which I had just noticed.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I second that. It's a very creative mockumentary that explains how a fire-breathing Giant Flyer could exist.
Interestingly, it uses some of the same ideas as The Flight of Dragons - I wonder if that's just a coincidence or the mockumentary drew inspiration from said cartoon.
Edited by Snicka on Jul 11th 2023 at 5:56:39 PM
the cartoon film was influenced by the 1979 book The flight of dragons by Peter Dickinson which was both an art book and speculative evolution book looking at how dragons could have realistically existed.
Itβs possible that some of the people involved in making that show had come across the book as I would imagine they would have tried to research any existing theories/literature about how dragons might realistically function during the planning stage
(Not sure if such a topic already exists, if so please link me to it and lock the thread)
Alright I'm in the mood to ask about the biology Dragons. Rather how would they behave as realistic animals, what concessions would have to be made to ensure that they are viable beings and also questions of what specific versions (western fire-breating dragons, wyverns, more eastern serpentine or piscine dragons, etc)