How ‘Scientific’ are the Dragons of Westeros and Middle-World?
Who doesn’t love dragons? The guttural roar of Drogon of Westeros is one of the most distinctive elements of Game of Thrones. But George R R Martin is hardly the first to use dragons in a tale. And I am not just talking about Tolkien or Pratchett. Dragons have captured our imaginations for millennia.
Draconic creatures are first described in the mythologies of the ancient Near East and appear in ancient Mesopotamian art and literature. Stories about storm-gods slaying giant serpents occur throughout nearly all Indo-European and Near Eastern mythologies. Famous prototypical draconic creatures include the mušḫuššu of ancient Mesopotamia; Apep in Egyptian mythology; Vṛtra in the Rigveda; the Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible; Grand’Goule in the Poitou region in France, Python, Ladon, Wyvern, and the Lernaean Hydra in Greek mythology; Jörmungandr, Níðhöggr, and Fafnir in Norse mythology; and the dragon from Beowulf.
This article is Part 1 of my series on dragons where I try and explore the myth, the science and the fantastical elements behind dragons. In this article, I will put on my Leonard Hoffstader glasses, and look at the scientific possibility of some of the unique features we tend to associate with dragons.
FIRE-BREATHING:
Fire-breathing is not really something that occurs in nature. But we do have a much smaller equivalent, though it works, kind of, in reverse. The bombardier beetle sprays a mix of hot, noxious chemicals from its abdomen when it’s feeling threatened. It stores two compounds (hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone) in its body. It mixes them together with water and catalytic enzymes in a separate internal chamber to create an unholy hot, gassy, explosive spray.
But if tiny creatures farting bleach doesn’t quite capture the dragon-y grandeur of ancient Valyria, what are our other options? One might be the, er, power of actual farts. As some readers will know, many animals produce an abundance of flammable flatus. A cow produces between 250 and 500 litres of highly flammable methane a day. Most of this is belched out. In 2013, it was reported that a build-up of methane from a particularly afflicted dairy herd, coupled with an accidental spark of static electricity, ‘nearly blew the roof off [the] barn’ in Rasdorf, Germany.
So who knows, perhaps God did create some flying lizards with some sophisticated biological rerouting so that it came out of the right end, and in gassy quantities enough to burn down the towers of King’s Landing.
POWER OF FLIGHT:
This feels a lot easier to believe for anyone having watched the Jurassic Park movies. However, there is a bit of an itch that scientists and palaeontologists have not been able to quite shake off. For both Smaug and the pterosaurs have a similar problem: they are heavy! How exactly did they (or even could they) get off the ground considering how heavy they are. For the bigger an animal, the harder it becomes for it to fly since more lift is required to counteract its weight so it can take-off. If an animal is too heavy, it won’t be able to produce enough lift to get off the ground.
Turns out, Pterosaurs had a highly specialised respiratory system with air sacs in addition to their lungs. This is a much more effective breathing system. It aids in providing the large amounts of energy needed for flight. Pterosaurs had air sacs in their necks and trunk, and larger creatures also had them in their wings. In many cases, the air sacs invade the bones and hollow them out, making their wing bones extremely thin-walled.
Thin-walled hollow bones are important in flight for two reasons. First, they are lighter than bones filled with marrow. Additionally, the bones are more resistant to bending than bones with a smaller diameter and thicker walls and so are better able to deal with the heavy loads created by the pterosaurs’ large size.
Further, unlike birds with feathered wings, pterosaurs had a membrane that stretched from the end of an elongated fourth finger to their legs (more similar to a bat than a bird). This membrane had internal structures called actinofibrils to strengthen the wings, and provide structural support. Recent work has shown that they may have used their powerful forelimbs to launch themselves into the air in a similar way to vampire bats.
FROZEN EGGS:
At Daenerys Targaryen‘s wedding to Khal Drogo, Magister Illyrio Mopatis gives her a gift of three fossilized dragon’s eggs. After Drogo’s death and the death of their son, Daenerys places the eggs on her husband’s funeral pyre: the black beside his heart, under his arm, the green beside his head, the cream-and-gold down between his legs. After the pyre is lit, Daenerys walks into the fire, and the eggs hatch into living dragon.
Now this sort of cryopreservation of dragon eggs is not entirely unheard of in our world. There are eggs that hatch after a long delay. The fetus essentially presses ‘pause’ on its development in a process called ‘arrested embryonic development’ (AED). This is not a pun on a popular sitcom. It refers to an unhatched reptile who decides to ‘wait’ to develop until more favourable environmental conditions decide to present themselves. AED happens to eggs with very thick shells (dragonlore-check) or children who don’t receive much in the way of parental care. I can’t imagine Smaug’s mother being very affectionate. However, this foetal ‘pause’ only lasts about a year in reptiles, which is not a lot when compared to the century long intermission in the life of Drogon. But who knows, maybe dragon babies had more will than the lazy reptiles of today.
REPRODUCTION WITHOUT ASSISTANCE:
In Game of Thrones, dragons can sometimes reproduce by themselves, with their genders rumored to be interchangeable. For instance, while Maester Aemon is dying in A Feast for Crows, he expresses his belief that Daenerys is the prophesied Prince That Was Promised, since the word has no gender in the original High Valyrian. By way of explanation, he references Unnatural History and says. “The error crept in from the translation. Dragons are neither male nor female, Barth saw the truth of that, but now one and now the other, as changeable as flame.”
In our world, another dragon (not the flying, fire-breathing variety), has made babies in the same way! A female Komodo dragon became pregnant without any contact with a male dragon. Our own reptilian Mother Mary, if you will. A virgin birth or, as biologists call it, ‘parthenogenesis’.
70 species of vertebrates have demonstrated such virgin births where an unfertilized egg develops to maturity. This includes captive snakes and a monitor lizard species. In most of these reptile cases, this process is their only method of reproduction.
So maybe Drogon is NOT going to be the last dragon on Game of Thrones, after all.
To-Be-Continued
