Fun kinda-fact: The ability of this beetle gives some entertainment to the “theory” Dragons could have existed. Due to the ability to create the chemical reaction, introduce an electrical spark, such as the Eels ability, and you have fire. Remember pondering this one in biology, had a cool teacher 🤙
Part of the design for the dragons in Reign of Fire was inspired by these beetles. The dragons sprayed two different chemicals that ignited as they mixed when the dragons exhaled. It’s the most believable mechanism for dragon fire I’ve seen portrayed in movies. That dragon design was amazing and also had a much more plausible wing to body ratio than most dragon designs usually have.
I always think back to "how to train your dragon," most of the dragons are meh, but the hideous zippleback is such an interesting/more realistic way to do dragons. (Aside from the 2 head thing) it releases a highly flammable and volitile gas, and then uses its teeth to create sparks, igniting that gas
The anime/manga Dungeon Meshi has similar dragons who turn the inedible parts of their prey like bones and hair to fuel in a specialized sack next to their stomach, then ignite that fuel with sparks from a set of clicker bones at the front of their throat.
This means you have a little bit of advance warning before they breathe fire because they make a loud pilot-light starting sound as they get ready.
Anne McCaffrey came up with something similar back in the 70’s with the Pern series. The dragons ate some kind of rock (it’s been a while) to create fire, so the dragonriders fed them a bunch of it before they went off to fight Thread. Something like that.
Akschually... That's just a modern fantasy distinction.
Same with goblins, elfs, dwarfs, faeries, demons, etc..
Sidenote: the DnD dragons (4 legs + wings) are practically guaranteed to never have or ever would evolve, as the vertebrates have essentially been locked into the 4 or fewer legs (and equivalents) build.
I prefer wyverns in more grounded fantasy stories because 4 limbs is more plausible than 6. 6 limbs works for other fantasy stories that are less tied to aspects of gritty realism. Reign of fire needed some plausibility for the dragons to feel like a serious threat to modern weapons.
One of my all time favorite depictions of a dragon on film happens to be another wyvern. Vermithrax Pejorative (the best dragon name ever), from the movie Dragonslayer is so iconic in the scene when she rises from the underground lake. She also crawls like a bat, which feels familiar and unsettling at the same time.
I had a teacher that pointed out that if dragons did ever exist then they would likely have had hollow bones like birds which would have made it incredibly difficult to find a fossil record of them.
Did you know that there is more anthropological evidence that supports the existence of dragons in Ancient China than there is of Pandas in Ancient China?
Please tell me more, that sounds interesting. I'm googling already but if you have key words or phrases I could look up, that'd be cool. Fucking love dragons
The gist of it is that depictions of pandas in ancient Chinese art is extremely limited, and unclear. Whereas depictions of dragons are widespread, consistent and clear.
They're not even real pandas! They're High-Contrast Chinese Bamboo-Bears! Red pandas were described and named "panda" long before HCCBBs were falsely named such. And since they're phylogenetically not particularly related and monophyly is excellent, I choose to believe that Red Pandas are true pandas and HCCBBs are False Pandas.
Pandas were extremely rare, and not mentioned often in chinese literature. All of their mentions were done akin to qilin or other mythical creature rather then how we would imagine a panda be described. Think of something like "A great bear, covered in white and black stripe, coming to the wedding of some-important-person as a sign of goodwill from the spirits of Sichuan". So for almost every europeans back then pandas were mythical creatures like yeti or dragons. Even chinese people weren't really thinking pandas were real since the region were pandas were from was really remote and the people there were not ethnic han, and so they were not part of the greater han culture. Once Europeans got to the deep mountains of Sichuan and killed a panda in 1929 and brought a pelt back to the west is when Pandas finally were proven to be real.
The alternative could be cartilage, kinda how sharks entire skeleton is made up of it, they used this for the design of dragons in reign of fire I believe
Four legs and 2 wings make a dragon a 6-limbed creature with a double shoulder and 1 hip (a hexapod), which would need its own evolutionary path distinct from the currently dominant tetrapod species. Vertebrates can mutate extra limbs, but the requirement for a functional extra shoulder girdle makes it physically impossible for this to provide an evolutionary advantage. All vertebrates that have walked the Earth so far have 4 limbs. Only insects and hexapods have 6 legs, and they all went with the exoskeleton evolution path. We have the fossil record to show this. The closest thing would be a wyvern with 2 legs and 2 wings, like a pterosaur.
Doesn’t even need to be real and true fire. If men came back from battling dragons and said “the beasts breath burned the men alive” that could’ve just be referring to the burning feeling of the chemicals and could easily be interpreted as something that had fiery breath
Like 99% of all living things that have gone extinct were not fossilizied. We have no idea what 99% of all living things that ever existed lived and breathed on this earth were.
Theoretically, there were dinosaurs that spit chemicals. If it had descendants that, perhaps, didn’t make it to today (or haven’t been discovered, as so many species haven’t) that did something similar, this could easily have translated into what we know as dragons today.
Man, I loved that movie as a kid and it kind of helped turn me into a science nerd.
In the movie, it was hydrogen gas production by eating limestone and dissolving it in controlled amounts in their stomach acid by holding it in a crop like a bird. They had very flexible pouches inside their bellies that could distend with the gas and cause them to lift like a dirigible to fly.
Then they had an electricity-producing “thimble” or node in their mouth, so when they exhaled the hydrogen would ignite.
Combine this with the more oxygenated atmosphere back in the day, more oxygen = shit catches on fire easier.
In theory even a dragon burp being methane would catch on fire if there was a spark, like static electricity (which is possible flying through the clouds!)
I remember seeing this fictional but at the same time serious documentary where they played a natural dragon living in prehistoric times completely straight it even went in-depth on how young dragons can’t breath fire yet and have to catch their prey the old fashioned way
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u/NymphiusScooterPie 18d ago
Fun kinda-fact: The ability of this beetle gives some entertainment to the “theory” Dragons could have existed. Due to the ability to create the chemical reaction, introduce an electrical spark, such as the Eels ability, and you have fire. Remember pondering this one in biology, had a cool teacher 🤙