Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Comments on How could dragons be explained without magic?

Post

How could dragons be explained without magic?

+2
−0

Dragons are a grand classic of fantasy. For this question, let's assume we're talking about the following stereotype:

  • hatches from an ostrich-sized egg and can grow to mountain size if nothing limits its growth (enough food and space)
  • lizard-like appearance, bat like wings, able to fly
  • breathes fire
  • carnivorous

With an earth-like biology (or with believable variations), how close can we get of this dragon?

Explanations are especially needed for:

  • fire breathing: how it works? how it happened through evolution? how it impacts the nutrition requirements (if gas is produced in high quantity, surely there is an impact there)? how is it not deadly for the dragon itself?
  • flying: is the energy requirement believable (even with heavy fire-resistant scales)? how much can the body look like a komodo dragon without it being an aerodynamics issue?

And any other issue you can come up with ;-)

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/313. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

1 comment thread

General comments (1 comment)
General comments
deleted user wrote almost 3 years ago

My personal idea - aliens which have encountered real evolution-evolved dragons injected it into the minds of humans while the fire thing was just a human fantasy (all of this for some odd reason); an unfalsifiable assumption I think.