• Question: Why couldn't dragons exist, because there are loads of animals that scientists did not believe in, but proved to be real?

    Asked by isaacnewton123 to Matt, Leah, Andrea, Ana, Amar on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Komodo dragons are real but they’re a type of lizard!
      If you mean the mythical fire breathing variety then I don’t think there’s any one reason they don’t or couldn’t exist in the future.

      Animals evolve over time in response to their environment.
      If a lizard gained a mutation that allowed it to breathe fire it would only become widespread in the population if that lizard survived and had lots of children who could all breathe fire. This means the ability to breathe fire has to have an advantage. I’d guess that even if a lizard did develop that ability it might go wrong as what’s to stop it cooking its family by accident!

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      dragons are vertebrates, and vertebrates don’t have six limbs (dragons have four legs and two wings). that’s why there are no pegasus horses or winged monkeys.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      There are a few different reasons why we can be confident that the sort of enormous, fire-breathing dragons that are shown in films are unlikely ever to have lived or to evolve in the future.
      1) Fire breathing, like Ana said, could only evolve if it was really useful and did not harm the dragon itself.
      2) There is a limit to how big an animal can get and still be able to fly – the muscle needed to power a dragons wings would be so heavy and big that they would never get off the ground.
      3) There would need to be enough food to keep it going. A massive dragon with gigantic muscles would need to eat tonnes of food to keep it going so there would have to be enough prey that grow and reproduce quickly enough to feed a dragon appetite – otherwise they would soon run out of food and die out.

      Having said that, there are some animals that have ‘dragon-like’ features:
      Pterosaurs, which were a type of dinosaur, were as tall as giraffes and had wings that were 10 meters across (although scientists think that it wasn’t brilliant at flying because of the weight of it’s muscles!)

      There are quite a few insects that can squirt poison or glue to catch and kill their prey (the amounts they quirt are too small to harm humans). The bombardier beetle is probably the most dragon-like as it can squirt boiling hot acid from it’s abdomen at predators!

      There is also a lizard that lives in Asia, called Draco volans (the flying dragon) that looks a lot like a dragon and has expanding wings that it uses to glide, but it only grows to about 20cm long!

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      There is absolutely no reason why they could not exist. Scientists are trained to look at the evidence, and explain a theory or mechanism that is fully consistent with it.

      So, at the moment there is no evidence for fire breathing, winged dragon either in the fossil record or by examining the world around us. However, if new evidence was repeatbly found that indicated that dragon do/did exist scientists would have to accept that. This is THE MAIN CORNERSTONE of science – look at ALL the evidence then come up with a theory that can explain it all.

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