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sorry what

That header photo doesn’t do the dragon justice. (For shame!). Here’s NASA’s own photo:

(Source [Because NASA is funded by taxpayer money, all their images are public domain, BTW])

THE TIME HAS COME

he is here 

Reblogging for THE ART HOLY SHIT

REALLY THOUGH IMAGINE SEEING THIS KIND OF SHIT AS A DANE IN THE 900S

@chaoticgoodthief

Is this the first

time

that you’ve ever seen?

Sometimes you just need to stop everything you’re doing and draw dragons…

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei & Ye Zun & Zhao Yunlan & Da Qing

Characters: Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei (Guardian), Ye Zun (Guardian)

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Fluff, Established Relationship, Bonding, Tiny Dragon Shen Wei, Chinese Culture

Summary:

Zhao Yunlan, the tiny dragon twins and Da Qing attend a dragon boat race.

A fill for the @guardianbingo June bonus prompt: Dragon.

Dragons are basically fish, when you get down to it.

There’s no such thing as fish. The word doesn’t have any taxonomic meaning. It’s a word we’ve used to describe everything from hagfish to goldfish, even though a coelacanth is more closely related to a camel than a salmon. But because they inhabit the same ecological niche of “vertebrate animal with gills and fins,” we call them all fish.

Likewise, there’s no such thing as dragons. We call anything that fills the mytho-ecological niche of “dangerous animal that blocks the way” a dragon. And that’s why any kind of argument of what does and doesn’t count as a dragon is moot — wyverns are dragons just as much as a jabberwock or a jaculus or a tatzelwurm, not because they’re closely related in a biological clade but because they fill a narrative niche.

Dragons are also lobsters, but that’s for unrelated reasons.

The more I think about it the more I realise that no ancient civilization would be at all interested in taming dragons.

Dragons are carnivores, so they’re really inefficient and costly to feed. They’re solitary, so its really frigging hard to form any kind of relationship with them. They’re darn right dangerous, so why risk your life taming one when there’s loads of llamas in the world. And worst of all their life spans are insanely long; if you had an opportunity to breed one, you wouldn’t live long enough to see the fruit of your labour mature, so you wouldn’t even bother.

@zarekthelordofthefries

‘BABY BOOMER TAMES DRAGON. REFUSES TO BREED IT. SAYS “MILLENIALS SHOULD BE SATISFIED WITH LLAMAS” DOES A SICK LOOP-DE-LOOP ON BACK OF DRAGON’

Not sure I’d agree with that, since cats are obligate carnivores and became domesticated. Seems like it would depend more on the size of the dragon in question. Also, being reptiles, I think they’d actually be less expensive to feed than a carnivorous mammals since reptilian metabolisms tend to be slower, which is why snakes and lizards can go a very long time between meals if the food happens to be big enough.

Oh cats and dogs are most certainly carnivores, but they happen to also be pack animals, relatively safe to interact with, and have an ideal maturation rate and brood size for breading. They manage to tick some boxes which make them legitimate for domesticating.  Elephants come to mind as something less than ideal to tame that humans just, decided to tame anyway. Their maturation rate is crazy long and elephants can kill. But they are herbivores, making them deceptively cheep to feed for their size (Well, relatively, big herbivores are expensive to feed, but at least you’re paying to only feed it, not every big herbivore it ever eats) and Elephants are SUPER sociable. But even so, Elephants aren’t the most popular in terms of domestication.  Dragons meanwhile have so very little qualities which would make them good for domestication. (Being really freaking cool, terrifying in battle, and useful for travel are good incentives to try to domesticate a dragon, but it doesn’t mean an industry of domesticating them is going to be plausible.)  You’ve got me on the reptile metabolism thing. I don’t know enough about that topic to discuss it.

cats only became more sociable through domestication. so if u could domesticate a dragon having a giant animal to fly u and things long distance would be very valuable, and even though they take a long time to grow if they are passed down thru families they could be valuable

They could be bred to be more sociable through rapid selective breeding. Which is why if dragons had to be domesticated I’d choose the game of thrones ones because holy flip that dragon is an adult and only five years old. But cats were sociable to begin with, they live in prides; it’s in their nature to socialise, so humans could get all up in that.

A dragon pet being valuable doesn’t overcome a dragon being plausible. I’m sure some dragon fanatics who have the wealth, land, and disposable people to domesticate one dragon would occasionally manage to, but not civilisations.

I’m sure one guy who really loves the abstract idea of heritage would put the effort into breeding their dragon so that their great great grand daughter could have a dragon too, but there’s nothing to say that grand daughter will feel the same way about a load of descendents she’s never going to meet.

Dragons will be for the super rich fanatics, civisiations would have to make do with drawings of their kings riding them.

I’d like to point out that the “low metabolism” thing is bunk.

Dragons (as described here) would be flying animals. Giant flying animals. Giant flying animals that breathe fire. Flight is the single most costly mode of transportation ever evolved by a huge margin; birds on the wing use about 7 times the energy that they use while at rest. By comparison, we humans only use less than twice our “resting energy” while walking. As is expected, these ratios increase with an animal’s size. A dragon large enough to carry a human is gonna need a FRICKEN LOT of energy to be able to fly at all, which requires a fast metabolism to provide (yes, even if it doesn’t fly very much).

Secondly, fire. How would they produce it? They sure wouldn’t breathe fire just by thinking “burny” thoughts, and the flames most dragons are depicted as producing are strong and persistent which isn’t consistent with the common “gas bladder” explanation given by many. This suggests the production of liquid fuel, a method of ignition, and more importantly a way to throw that fuel far enough for the dragon to hit things without burning itself alive. I don’t know how it’s gonna accomplish those things, but I guarantee you that it ain’t gonna be cheap. The fuel alone would require so many kilocalories, like you wouldn’t believe how many KCs are in a napalm-like fuel, like holy crap. It’s gonna need a TON of food to produce that.

So, yeah, reptile or not, a dragon would definitely need way more food to stay alive and do dragony things than a non-dragon critter of similar size. Unless you’re a monarch who doesn’t particularly care how starving your subjects are, dragon domestication is a no-no.

^ I was thinking that while reading this post

get these dragon taming elitists of my dash

I’m glad dragons aren’t real; the dragon fandom would suck all the fun out of them. 

consider this. they’re magical animals that work by magic. its the only explanation for why any thing about them makes sense. for one thing, for anything at that size to get airborn under normal circumstances, the size its wings would need to be is absurd and impractical. they work by magic becuase they’re inherently magical creatures. no one asks how a unicorn has healing powers becuase they’re understood to be magical

Screw magic. Also screw carnivore dragons.

Omnivore dragons.

A dragon marauds into an area and eats all the livestock, sure, but there’s also crops, trees, plants, houses, etc. Why should dragons just eat all the sheep in an area when they can break the grain silo open and go to town? Devastate a year’s worth of harvests then try to waddle away because they’re too fat to fly (like a gorged vulture).

Even “carnivores” like bears and wolves will eat fruit, nuts, grass, things, etc because it’s easier than chasing down prey. Why restrict dragons? Why insist dragons are too discerning?

Omnivore dragons ftw.

That’s a point. What’s the benefit of being strictly a carnivore anyway? Digesting things becomes a lot easier, but dragons are BIG, they should have room for enough stomachs to eat just, all the trees. 

Simply put, the benefit of being a hypercarnivore (having a diet comprised 70% or greater of animals) is indeed that digesting things becomes a lot easier. 

Foraging is a very expensive activity. To make the investment of food-collection worthwhile, an animal needs returns on whatever it eats that outweigh that investment. Cows eat grass, need to spend pretty much all of their time grazing just to turn an energetic profit, and their lifestyle is hardly a fast-paced one.  Cheetahs, on the other hand, eat tasty tasty dead things only every once in a while, and theirs is the most fast-paced life of any terrestrial vertebrate. The tradeoff is that they can’t afford to do anything but rest while they’re not foraging.

Back to the issue at hand, why should a dragon be strictly carnivorous? Let’s look at the numbers: A pound of grain (in this case wheat) has about 1,500 kilocalories of available energy, while a pound of classic Dragon Food (sheepies!) only has about 1300. From just this, the argument for the “omnivorous harvestfucker” dragon is pretty convincing! However, lean meat is not the only component of sheep. They’re also full of tasty fat (3500 KCal/lb) and bone marrow (3500 KCal/lb).

Assuming your average sheep weighs ~150 pounds and has a median bodyfat content of ~15%, a hungry dragon can expect to net a whopping 275000 kilocalories from a single animal. Compare that to the 225000 kilocalories from a similar mass of grain. It may not seem like much, but when you’re a massive hypercarnivore that 50 million calorie difference is a huge motivator.

So while I’m not completely opposed to the idea of omnivorous dragons, I’d wager that if they existed they’d be eyeing the waddling balls of penned mutton more often than fortified grain silos.

Dragons taming humans makes much more sense.

Yes, but all this feeding talk is completely redundant if you can’t catch and pen one to begin with.

Like, look at buffaloes. They’re grazing animals that produce meat and fur that can, and historically has, been used for food and shelter. And yet, they have only very recently been domesticated. Not because ancient people didn’t want to domesticate them, but because they couldn’t. Buffaloes are huge and they will attack you if you mess. It’d be like being attacked by a steamroller.

That’s the same reason why we’ve never domesticated lions or tigers or bears (oh my). As cool as it would be to ride a friggin’ war bear into battle, they’re just not good for domestication to get your war bear in the first place. When you just have a stick with a pointy rock on one end, maybe a sheet of metal covering your torso, and more gumption than is good for you and your going up against something at least twice your size with daggers attached to each of its toes and no problem attacking you to defend itself, your not gonna win.

Dragons, in most depictions, are big as houses with diamond hard scales, have claws the size of people, and, in many stories, have human like intelligence (which brings up a moral aspect to domestication). Oh yeah, and they can fly.

Maybe the odds of achieving a capture of one would be plausible now in modern times where we have the technology to match their power, but in medieval times, you can get a group of fifty of the strongest warriors to try and catch one, but the only thing you can be guaranteed is that most of them will die in the process, assuming that the dragon doesn’t just fly off to begin with, in which the warriors would have no way of following. And then, assuming by some miracle they do manage to catch one, they still have to catch a second one for breeding. And after the lose of life capturing the first one, you’ll be hard pressed to find people willing to go after a second one.

The only way around that is if your dragons are no bigger than horses with little natural protection to begin with and then you breed them into the large powerhouses you see in stories (that’s what they did in the Pern novels by Anne Mccaffrey).

And then you’ve got the dragons with human like intelligence. There’s no domesticating them, because then it’s slavery. But, alliances can be brokered with them, which means awesome dragon societies.

But wait, there is a third option here. Dragons (of the non-human like intelligence variety) do like cats did and domesticate themselves.

Because why bother stealing food from the humans when you can just get the humans to willingly give the food to you. You might have to do a bit of guard work for them or let them ride on your back or go attack other humans for them, but in return you get fed choice meals, get better places to sleep in beside a cave (that will increasingly improve with human technology), have a safe place away from predators to have your eggs, have that hard to reach spot scratched for you whenever it gets itchy, and just over all have a more secure life than you would’ve trying to survive on your own in the wild. 

In short, if you watch over the sheepies and protect them from predators and thieves for a few hours, you will get to eat some of the sheepies in reward, which takes a lot less effort than trying to steal them yourself.

Because quite frankly, one of the best survival techniques for non-humans is to be useful to humans. Because we are super clingy that way.

Dragon taming discourse

I’m now thinking about dragons domesticating themselves because humans produce things like olive oil and similar plant-based fats that make being omnivorous much less of a pain (they avoid having to eat a fuck-ton of olives or whatever and dealing with all the fiber, sugars, and other things that are not fats), and things like butter that collect several animals’ output of milk and concentrate all the fats into one tasty and longer-keeping solid.

Dragons domesticating themselves because humans have hearth-fires and buildings that keep out the cold, vastly diminishing the energy they have to consume to regulate their body temperature and making winters much more comfortable (some castles and manors have giant fireplaces, perfect for a dragon to sleep in, curled around the fire).

Dragons domesticating themselves because humans don’t eat the bones or viscera of animals they butcher, and depending on prosperity level may consider some of the cuts of meat undesirable, so the remnants of a hard day’s work for a butcher might be a very easy-to-get source of calories (especially if dragons are like lammergeyers and have the ability to digest bone).

Dragons domesticating themselves because humans like the horns, antlers, and hides of prey animals, and giving a human these parts that aren’t good to eat can earn gratitude in the form of a nice warm fire in the winter, or a place to shelter from the storms; dragons learning that humans place high value on certain things, like the winter pelts of a fox; dragons using the power of flight to go where humans can’t easily access, like taking ibex and chamois from the high mountaintops, bringing the carcasses to the human towns and presently getting a pile of bones, organs, fats, meat scraps, and a jar of olive oil as well, and the warm embers of a fire to sleep in.

This is a bit late in the thread, but rather than needing to come up with the calorie requirement for flight AND for a biochemical production of fire, why not just solve both through fossil fuel consumption? Dragons eat coal, breathe fire. Simple. 

This would probably narrow down their domestication period until around about when humans started mining on a wide scale, in much the same way and for the same reasons as why feline domestication happened around the time of granaries: suddenly, the best source of food is where the humans are. It would probably only be a matter of time before the miners started eyeing the dragons’ claws in aid of digging, muscles in aid of hauling, and flame in aid of refining.

What I’m saying is that fuck humans, dwarves  should have been the ones to domesticate dragons.

The depth of this post and it’s reblogs is the reason I love tumblr. Congratulations guys!

i agree to all of this

but what if: a world where every use of cats is just tiny dragons

Sea and Sky

The first time Blaec saw her, he was winging his way from Egypt- although it wasn’t called that yet- across the Mediterranean sea towards Iceland and the volcanoes there. He had out grown his current lair, and the humans were getting annoying, and so it was time to find somewhere else to live.

She was beautiful, although young. Bright red scales spread out with spines that showed how deadly she could be, and hair so golden it was fit for his hoard. She shone against the rocks near an island, wet from the glittering sea, and at home in her element.

She saw him then, a mere shiplength of black scales, borne aloft by magic and wings. Rather than hide, as so many did, she raised a hand in greeting, and he found himself whistling back to her, a greeting from a throat that could not yet speak her tongue.

He thought of her sometimes, in the next years. Although he rarely bothered to count them, they passed nonetheless. For a time, he counted the time in sheds- times when all of his armor fell off, and he swept it into a volcano rather than allow the humans to make use of it. Then, when his sheds became more and more rare, he began counting the years in other ways.

By the time his homeland had the name it would cary for centuries hence, he had tripled in size, and learned to cloak himself either as a human- mostly for his own amusement- or to simply go unseen on the wing, able to survey his growing territory as he pleased.

It was not until the Athens he vaguely remembered gave way to the greater power of Rome that Blaec saw her again. She was on the same rock as before, worn down smooth from many visits, and guarded by others to keep her safe from passing ships that might see her and want what they could not have.

By now he knew the word for her kind, although they were few and rare. The daughters of an ocean god who loved, and drowned, a mortal.

Intrigued, he winged lower, and she raised a hand in greeting, but barely stirred from her comfortable rock.

Rather than disturb her, he backwinged and landed lightly in the water, and let himself float to her side, propelled by his tail.

“You are a dragon,” she said simply, and propped her chin on her hands to look at him. His head was bigger than she, and his teeth like swords, but she was unconcerned. “I saw you once. I wondered what you were, and when I asked my father, he said ‘dragon’.”

“Dragon I am,” Blaec answered, and lowered his head to examine her. Her hair was just as golden as he remembered, and distracting, but his curiosity was greater. And now he spoke her tongue. Many tongues, in fact. Language proved to be more interesting than he expected. “And you are Seirēn.”

“They call us mermaids, now,” she laughed, and he found that he liked her voice. “but Seirēn I am, true and true enough. What brings you here, dragon? Have you a name I might call you?”

“Blaec,” he supplied. It was the name he chose for himself, when he first discovered how much he enjoyed talking to beings that could not produce the fire-burned Dragon name for him that he was born knowing. “And you?”

“I called myself Evelene to the humans west of here,” she answered, and sat up, braced by her red-scaled tail. “They wanted a name the humans could use and I liked how that one sounded.”

Blaec snuffed a laugh of his own. “My own is unpronounceable as well,” he admitted slyly, and on impulse, spoke it for her with fire licking over his tongue. “Blaec I am, and so Blaec I am.”

A coil of pride filled his wingtips when she laughed again, and held out an imploring hand. “May I touch you? I hear the songs of your kind, but none of them speak of how a people that bears scales and flies might feel. And now I see your fire as well.”

Obligingly, Blaec lowered himself so she could run a hand over his nose, and feel the tiny scales that lined his eyes. He was in no danger from her. Even young as he was, something her size could do him no harm where human bows and catapults had failed.

“They’re soft here,” she whispered wonderingly, and he snuffled against her palm. She smelled of sea, and he found it pleasing. “But harder on your nose, and brow. And I can see the others from here, big as a shield, each one. Armor?”

“Yes.”

He wanted to fly off with her, but kidnapping was rude as he understood it, and she was the daughter of a god. It didn’t do to annoy gods.

“Have you ever wished to fly?” he asked instead, impulsive, but curious, and purring despite himself as she stroked the tender scales around his eyes. “I could carry you. Your spines will not harm me.”

Her lips dropped open in wonder at his offer, and her eyes lit like sapphires.

“Could I- if it is not rude- if you would deign-“ she stumbled over herself in her excitement and he chuckled, and shoved his nose farther into her hand. “Could I ride on your back?”

He cocked his head. “You would fall off,” he said regretfully. “you are not able to sit astride, and even if I were careful, I might drop you.”

“is that all?”

He pulled back as she lifted her tail- red and white striped with magnificent spines- out of the water. In moments, the scales drifted away as sea foam, and she stood weakly on two very human legs. When she stumbled, he was there, and she leaned on his nose to keep her feet.

“I am not very good at this,” she giggled, and he snorted, but moved so she cold get a leg over his neck, just behind his head where his back-spines left a space. “can you shift as well?”

“Into whatever I choose,” Blaec confirmed, and used her rock to get most of his bulk out of the water where he would have to work so hard to gain altitude. “Hold on.”

She shrieked as he took off, but it was a scream of joy and excitement, and he purred to hear it.

“Higher?” she begged into his ear-holes, and he bared his teeth, and took them into the clouds, and higher.

A sudden, terrifying thought

When you see an animal with its eyes set to the front, like wolves, or humans, that’s usually a predator animal.

If you see an animal with its eyes set farther back, though—to the side—that animal is prey.

Now look at this dragon.

See those eyes?

They’re to the SIDE.

This raises an interesting—and terrifying—question.

What in the name of Lovecraft led evolution to consider DRAGONS…

As PREY?

I know this isn’t part of my blogs theme but like this is interesting

i know this isn’t part of my blogs theme but like this is interesting

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The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.

hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole

This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.

(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)

But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.

For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.

Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?

A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.

Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.

this is some good dragon discourse right here, 10/10, and i dont mean to derail the whole thing away from the eyes, but i feel obligated to mention that in many stories and accurate to some reptiles, dragons have an extremely acute sense of smell/taste which would definitely help narrow down the depth perception issue. things smell stronger the closer they are. and i feel like i read somewhere that a blind snake can flick the air with its tongue and track its target mouse with no trouble at all. gotta imagine the “great serpents of the sky” had some pretty advanced biology. enough to make field of view win out against depth perception.

anywho. cool stuff. fear the dragons even if they are the prey cause they still beat us on the food chain.

“A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.”

I’m watching Jeremy’s post-after life stream and I was obviously inspired to draw the dragon cat :3c

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