Are dragons cold or warm blooded?
My world is science-based with an earth-like biology. The dragons fly when they're young and then grow too heavy and can only glide if at all. They breathe fire by expelling gas and igniting it. They are carnivores. See How could dragons be explained without magic? for more.
Knowing that dragons look like big lizards, we could assume they are cold blooded. But dinosaurs were neither cold nor warm blooded. And finally, they do breathe out fire (probably from exhaling a gas or a combination of gases that then ignite) so they must be able to withstand some relatively high temperatures...
So what makes the most sense? Hot, cold, or neither?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/404. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I think an interesting option could also be that dragons can switch between cold-blooded and warm-blooded metabolism. For example, they could be warm-blooded when young (providing them the needed energy to fly), but then convert to cold-blooded (or in-between) when they get old (so they can grow without having to grow their food intake at the same rate; at old age, they are no more able to fly anyway, according to your assumption).
The conversion might be a continuous process (they start warm-blooded, but their metabolism gradually goes down as they grow), or it could be a specific transition phase at a certain age (not too different from puberty or menopause for humans, except of course humans don't change their warm-bloodedness in that process). Such a transition phase would then also go with specific noticeable behaviour changes.
0 comment threads