If Evolution Had Taken a Different Turn, Could Dragons Have Existed?

this is popular science, not popular fantasy,

Monkeyboy, science first starts as "fantasy" then moves through the ladder of creation to reality. Latly there's been too many critical people on the site.

and dragons will become real Christopher? cool, i will keep an eye on this story, oh, because you know, they are planning on genetically engineer a dragon:this will never happen, people won't be allowed to clone a friggin' dodo bird, and you think fire breathing dragons, have scientific significance......

this is popular science, not popular fantasy,

The operative term here is POPULAR. If you want fewer fun articles, go read a scientific journal.

the operative term is science.

@monkeyboy199271

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson makes a somewhat plausible case for hydrogen production.

We may not be bringing back the Dodo (why?) or concocting DNA recipes for dragons yet but its coming.

And I don’t know why the article is stuck on such a large size. I would think design on a smaller scale (1-2 feet long) would be much easier and then you can create the pet dragon market to provide private funding. I keep thinking about the flying lizard thing from that BBC show Primeval [side note: anyone know if/when a new season is coming out?]. I would also ditch the fire idea. I don’t want to try housebreaking a pet that can do that.

As the Coke commercial says… “I’m looking at you scientists.”

You should have made the picture at the end of Dragonite so we could all play "Who's that Pokemon??"

Dragons are shared by all civilizations across all time (if you include religious texts). That sounds like a huge coincidence. My favourite theory :

The idea is that dinosaurs inspired the myths of dragons, but not the dead variety. If memory serves, it is the Lima Museum of Peru that holds rock art dipecting a man riding a tricertops (sure, that's not weird)along with several other rocks dipecting similar images. Recognized officials had proved them authentic, although I do not remember any dating. Similar accounts date back to Cortez.

Any way it's something to sit and think about.

"Crazy science is the best kind."

Well it's funny that monkey mentions genetic engineering, because it defeats his own argument. The idea of the article shows that it could be possible to engineer a dragon - very science-y indeed.

the item about the parasite that grows extra limbs on that species of frog out west made my eyebrows shoot up. i know there's some weird things going on in nature, but that's some x-files sounding shi*

Actually, there was a recent story about actual dinosaur soft tissue being discovered in a bone fragment when mixed with a solvent. They actually found blood vessels and other tissues. Some scientists are skeptical, but the team responsible are quite serious about combining/cloning modern, evolved dinosaurs (chickens) with this DNA collected from the tissue ... actually creating a living, breathing dinosaur. If you factor in our exponential growth in regards to our science/technology within the next 50 years .... who he hell is to say what types of conversations constitute "science" or not. Could it be a conversation on dragons is trivial and silly? of course. Or, could it be our very definitions on what we equate to be "trivial" in regards to the natural world is silly? "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine .... its queerer that we *can* imagine."

"...who the hell is to say what types of conversations constitute "science" or not..."

I believe you are absolutely correct! Who is to say what can or can't be scientific? :) Now, I'll probably get some harsh responses to this statement, but using this same logic, "who is to say what is/ isn't 'science' ," what about Intelligent Design? :) Who has the authority to name what should be allowed in scientific study. Oh, but there's no proof, no evidence for ID. Yeah? Can you point me to the undeniable proof that supports Darwinian Evolution? Well, there's no doubt that 'Evolution' occurs, we've observed microevolution in many different organisms, such as new breeds of plants, dogs, cattle, etc... but in each of these observations, plants stayed plants, dogs stayed dogs, cattle remained cattle, etc... No one has every observed macroevolution, one species changing into another, DIFFERENT species. This is a fact, unless there is some top-secret file somewhere that no one has ever told us about before lol :) . Now, bearing that in mind, how can we accept this theory as fact when one of it's key principles hasn't ever been OBSERVED (which in itself is required for something to be traditionally scientific, it must be observable. *I know we haven't observed ID in action ourselves either, but I'm pointing out this hole in Darwinian logic). Give me one instance of one species changing into a new species and you will nullify my argument, however, i'm certain there won't be any applicable evidence. The truth is, 'science' will never be able to explain the origin of life, because of it's own limiting factors that the event must be observable and must be repeatable. I also have yet to see any scientists talking about how they were there when life began. Also, no scientist has to date proved life could've arisen by itself from the hypothesized primordial environment. Until these points are proven or corrected and unfaltering evidence is shown, I will stand firm in my own beliefs about life, and beyond life.
I hope if anyone took the time to read this entire comment that i will have raised some doubt in your mind about this, FAULTY THEORY, that has been blindly accepted as fact.

I won't state my own beliefs here so as not to raise any more ruckus than i will with this comment, but if anyone wants to know about them, feel free to ask :).

Until then, good day/afternoon/night/morning to everyone, and God bless you all.

@criticalscience
Try visiting museums with fossils, or reading scientific books. I can't point you to sources because it would require tons of links which would make me a spammer probably. Search for Richard Dawkins in Search Engines (-:

I would consider ID as scientific if ID-ers publish a scientific papers with observable claims and something that can be tested and verified. Until then, I stick to evolution.

@gordon freeman
I've been to museums, and they have a lot of fossils and exhibits yes. But the one thing they lack are transitional organisms, those mysterious 'missing links' which have remained missing even after extensive fossil digs and many discoveries of new species, not any 'transitionals' yet lol. I've also heard of Richard Dawkins, I have read about him, and watched an interview he did for 'Expelled; No Intelligence Allowed' which gave me a pretty good view of where he stands.

"who is to say what is/ isn't 'science' , what about Intelligent Design? :) Who has the authority to name what should be allowed in scientific study."

It has nothing to do authority it has only to do with empirical data which can be expressed within some formal system of logic.

“Oh, but there's no proof, no evidence for ID. Yeah? Can you point me to the undeniable proof that supports Darwinian Evolution?”

Yes, you are correct there is no evidence whatsoever to support ID. And yes, I can point to undeniable proof that supports Darwinian Evolution. The truly humorous thing is that even in the face of undeniable proof people have the extraordinary ability to continue to deny.

“No one has every observed macroevolution, one species changing into another”

Actually we have. Species are always changing and when a population is separated by some barrier they make eventually evolve into different species. This of course can take thousands if not millions of years to occur but it does occur and we have proof of that fact.

“Give me one instance of one species changing into a new species and you will nullify my argument.”

Monarch Flycatchers. Done.

“However, I'm certain there won't be any applicable evidence.”

And I’m certain that you don’t want their to be any applicable evidence and simply reject it when it is presented to you.

“The truth is, 'science' will never be able to explain the origin of life, because of it's own limiting factors that the event must be observable and must be repeatable.”

Like a lot of armchair scientists (and I use the term extremely loosely) you are confusing abiogenesis with evolution. They are two separate theories.

“No scientist has to date proved life could've arisen by itself from the hypothesized primordial environment. Until these points are proven or corrected and unfaltering evidence is shown, I will stand firm in my own beliefs about life, and beyond life.”

And no one will care. If you haven’t noticed science isn’t really concerned with what you believe or do not believe. It is concerned with fact, not opinion.

“I hope if anyone took the time to read this entire comment that I will have raised some doubt in your mind about this, FAULTY THEORY, that has been blindly accepted as fact.”

Says the blind man…

They've been pushing man-made global warming for 30 years, so why not dragons? It's POPULAR science not, you know, ACTUAL science.

Actually, the dragon, or the intelligent reptile, does exist in a hyperspace co-dimension. These reptiles are known as the Nagas. About 65 million years ago, an asteroid was pushed out of orbit in order to wipe out the dinosaurs here on earth. In order to save the reptiles, they were moved to a hyperspace co-dimension. The Nagas made contact with us some years ago when they made the Julia Set fractal spiral crop circle. When talking to their chief scientist, the question came up about any evolutionary traits they had. She said, “We lost our tails!” This enabled them to stand upright. The Nagas have small green scales and lay eggs which are put in incubators in the hospital where they hatch. When talking to them, the room becomes like wavy water due to the low speed of light of the hyperspace energy. In fact, this is the discovery of gravitational waves. The wave has tension-compression components which are what flatten the wheat stalks of the crop circle. The stalks follow the space-time curvature so that they do not break. This phenomenon is similar to the right-angle turns made by their spacecraft’s dual folding space waveguides. She also confirmed that the electron is the proton by saying, “That is a good observation for your level of science.” After mentioning that we had reverse engineered the Roswell spacecraft, she said, “Nobody has those fragments! I don’t think you are telling the truth.” So she had her remote viewer verify it, after which she exclaimed, “You are on the way to the stars!” At the moment they are involved with astronomical observations through telescopes having the width of the galaxy as the baseline.

The persistence of the flying dragon myths is intriguing because there's nothing in science that forbids the creation of biological spaceflight systems.

Imagine, if you will, during the late Cretaceous period, when very social dinosaurs may have become aware of an impending asteroid impact, that they decide to breed a species of dinosaur designed for spaceflight to ensure the continuation of the culture.

The fossil record may only show us precursors of that spaceflight species if it actually left the planet - such as those fossils found in Mongolia to fuel the Asian dragon myths.

Then add to that, the possible return of scouting patrol "dragons" within the last 25,000 years, to review the current state of the planet, with respect to returning to a climate suitable for "dragon" breeding, resulting in sporadic human contact with the species, and say, the introduction of fossil-fuel burning technologies and metallurgy to help change the climate to a warmer state, where trees can once again reach for the skies in over 100-foot stands suitable for feeding spaceflight dragons.

So, is a fire-breathing dragon essential for spaceflight? Accelerated exhaust gases of any kind might be.

Could a dinosaur's multiple stomach strategy create gases to fuel spaceflight?

We know that cows make a significant contribution to the greenhouse gases by emitting large quantities of methane, so it might be possible for a massive vegetation digester like the large Sauropods to co-evolve a gastro-bacteria culture that creates highly flammable liquid and/or gaseous fuel. Well, the Russians launched Soyuz with alcohol and kerosene fuel mixes.

Also, as far as I know, there have been no complete skeleton fossils found of Sauropods after a direct lightning strike. Given their ability to reach extreme heights, lightning should be an explosive danger for Sauropods after ruminating a few days on hundred foot tall vegetation, unless they wore well-grounded mobile lightning rods: Come to think of it, lightning may have been the reason Sauropods discovered spaceflight through unintentional ignition of gastro-intestinal gas emissions.

Could a dinosaur evolve a technology to ignite the fuel?

Well, we know that some dinosaurs had very large teeth, and with the right minerals embedded in the surface of the teeth, it is conceivable that by simply grinding teeth, an ignition spark could be initiated. Of course, this could explain why dragon lore is full of stories of dragons who horded rare minerals, gems, and metals.

Would the ignited gases be sufficient to achieve earth escape velocity and spaceflight?

We do know that some Sauropods were armored, which is odd for an animal that should have had severe bodyheat regulation problems given their size and the warmer Cretaceous climate on Earth.

Could that armor have been sufficient for ablative re-entry velocity reduction?

That is a question better left to bio-engineers and rocket dynamics teams. The math here is not that difficult to work out, and the basic design issues, while technically challenging, could make for an interesting MIT thesis and very intriguing DARPA grant proposal.

Given the potential flight dynamics of a four-legged dragon with long neck, tail, and wings, it might be possible for a dragon to actually "drop" back into the atmosphere, like the VSS Enterprise.

Afterall, we do know that the males of very long-tailed dinosaurs were able to move their tails at supersonic speeds, cracking the air like a whip, in order to attract mates and defend their hindquarters.

Doing the math to figure out what it would take to make a transonic spaceflight dinosaur should be pretty straightforward with today's aerodynamics CAD packages.

Breeding a transonic dinosaur would be a darn good reason to win a Nobel prize.

Well, at least an Anne McAffrey Prize, Anne being the author of the "Dragonriders of Pern."

At least, we can all agree that a dragon ride would be a very attention-getting way for PopSci readers to commute to work and school, as an answer to ending our dependence on foreign oil.

Then again, if there be dragons, we would all have to deal with figuring out how to keep all those dragons "happy." The Superbowl, beer, pizza, and 3D HDTV probably isn't the answer, when dragon lore reports human sacrifices were required to appease dragons.

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Unfortunately, what you forget, criticalscience, is that MICROevolution is the ENGINE for MACROevolution. Evolution does not happen in leaps and bounds, but small incremental changes over hundreds, maybe even thousands of generations. Remember your Mendel studies in school? Small genetic variations over time add up to BIG changes in future generations. A human lifespan is simply too short, and the scientific process too new, (relatively speaking) to have observed LARGE cumulative changes in species. It's like asking an ant to observe the building of an international freeway. An ant has a lifespan of about 90 days. It may see the ground-breaking, and leveling of the land, but it will not see the finished product. It wouldn't live long enough to see it. Now give the same ant some sort of recording medium (videotapes, a notebook to record it's observations,etc), and successive generations to continue its work, a few generations later, the highway is completed, and the ant colony now has a complete record of it. They can trace through their collective memory the building of that highway. Unfortunately, the Evolution highway began long before we developed our recording medium. So we're trying to play catch up. There are literally millions of transitional fossils, and even today we are watching microevolution make small changes to species that are alive today. We are only a few generations into our "recording process" of evolution. Within a few thousand, or even a few hundred years, we should have a VERY complete picture of the evolutionary process, and how species that we are familiar with today have changed into completely NEW species.

Well the first Quetzalcoatl is gonna be real interesting especially with a neck plume like a Scarlet Macaw or a Rainbow Lorikeet.

http://www.clearintelligentdesign.webs.com

Dear Dangerville

There actually aren't millions of transitional fossils, there are quite a few fossilized extinct species however. If you try to use what little amount of fossils we have (relatively speaking) to prove evolution, well, you are still missing MILLIONS of others for just one simple development.

And if you believe that all life evolved from a single cell, then there would have to be:

a two celled organism
a three celled organism
a four celled organism, and so on. Capish?

but science has no record of any of these...they don't even have a record of a twenty celled organism.

If you think what I'm saying has any merit, visit the site at the top of my post.

OK guys i have red many of your comments i have to say i strongly disagree with the ones calling this a non scientific question and i think this question can be analyzed from 3 interesting/scientific points of vew
#1 could natures evolution ingeneering create such a being and by such a being we should start by defining it i think most of us will understand some kind of big flying reptile of some sort wich might or might not throw fire, this is the analysis and the way most of you anylized the question(for those who did think there was something to analyze)and for this matter im most convinced it is possible, for starters birds are the direct desendants of dinosaures/reptiles and many of the reptiles where designed to plan or help themselves to run in high angled hills, also there are spitfire like mechanisms in nature such as in some beatles that mix an explosive chemichal compoud when in danger wich can atain hundreds of degrees while reacting.
#2 you could analize if such a creature would actualy be able or wouldve been able to survive at some scpecific ecosystem in the earths lie history
#3you could analize from wich common ancestor and the succession of genetic changes nessesarry to occur to it for it to become a "dragon",basily: in what age and space did the genetic anomalies took place and persevered and why they persevered, wich bones transformed or organs from what specie how or in what way to alow it to effectivly become a large,flying,firethrowing,reptile. this question allows for a lot of scientific reasoning and shame on the ones who rushed and called it fake science

@seth.cooper
well evolution is not some huge event that takes place in a short amount of time. evolution is the SLOW progressive changes of a organism due to breeding and genes. the organism that is not suited to survive, or has bad genes, dies, which leads to those genes not being passed on.
now if all you evolution haters say that ID is correct, then where is your proof? because i don't see it. and i see plenty of evidence proving evolution. what is the function of genes if ID is true? how do you explain dinosaurs evolving progressively into chickens and other avians?

Okay, just gonna say: to the creationists out there, your claims are plainly and simply unscientific. There is absolutely no scientific evidence FOR evolution that you cannot choose to ignore by stating "it was created that way." Your ideas are no more falsifiable than Freud's psychosexual theories, and no more testable either. As a loyal Christian, firmly convinced that GOD EVOLVED MAN, I will conclude my rant by stating my belief that your argument is invalid.

(Never mind. As a few Biblical references to back up both my faith and my science; I ask where Cain found the wife that bore him children if not among the other homo sapiens, the one's who hadn't just appeared out of the clay? (I'm not about to put the words "God made a wife for Cain," into the Bible when the Bible clearly never says that.) Why are we not all still bearing the incestuous burden of genetic disease? (Another miracle? But then why warn against incest and provide an example through Adam's children?) Why did God, in describing the act of 'creating,' choose to use in Genesis the same Hebrew verb "bara" as the psalmist used to write "'Create' in me a clean heart, O God," a usage that was almost certainly never used in the strict literal sense of "Please, Lord, would you wipe the soil out of my chest cavity?" One last thought: why do you claim that our awesome, infinitely powerful God could NOT have created the miracle of life using the scientific mechanisms and scientific timescale that He fashioned, facts which scientists of our day insist on calling "random chance?")

Three final notes

To Mr. Cooper: Science has plenty of records of few-cell organisms that you can see in microscopes today. Most are considered colonial. Some unicellular algae are very large, visible to the naked eye, because they contain multiple nuclei within the same cellular membrane. Volvox are photosynthetic (Not sure about that last bit?) bacteria that reproduce completely independently of one another, but live in little multicellular spherical colonies that function as one organism. Portuguese man-o-war (a type of jellyfish, kind of.) display a similar level of integration in that each colonial organism is made up of reproductively distinct individuals of the same species; men-o-war, however display a much greater level of physiological differentiation, with each individual (or zooid) taking up a different role in the overall animal's structure (i.e. some zooids digest, others capture prey as tentacles, others inflate and deflate the sail, etc.) It is theorized that primitive forms of this differentiation led to the multicellular, tissue-differentiated organisms of today.

To Mr. StClair: I am honestly curious to know how you would answer the question, "So what planet are you from?" Not because I'm trying in any way to antagonize you for your ideas, but because I truly believe that you would come up with a very elaborate and interesting answer.

To criticalscience: The important thing is not where Mr. Dawkins stands. The important thing is whether he can back up where he stands with valid proof proof. If somebody wrote a book called "The Dawkins Delusion," I would hope they stay away from his claims as a biologist and focus on his claims that biology necessitates atheism. His "selfish gene" theory is solid science.

Well, now that's over with, about genetically engineering dragons! It certainly seems to me that we would be a lot better off trying to breed dragons that about the size and shape of today's flying foxes, rather than the behemoths of legend. (Unless of course, we're going for Chinese or Mongolian style dragons that don't really have wings, in which case, bring on the shock-and-awe factor.) Working off this fruit-bat template, I think it would be easiest to try swapping the flying fox skull (mostly the ear) structure for the crocodilian slitted eyes and strange ears. Skin, of course, would have to be of a lizard or croc/gator. Since these would mostly likely end up as pets, the biggest key would be maintaining a mammalian brain and personality, and combining it with a reptilian look.

I honestly have no idea how one would go about making a more Chinese or Mongol-style dragon. There are so few comparable creatures in nature, that I imagine it would be far more difficult. Of course, considering our topic of conversation, that might sound a little redundant. One problem, I think, with pet dragons (and a boon for larger kin) would be that a bigger animal would be more capable of having the shock-and-awe flamethrower or acid-spitter. I'm not personally convinced that either option can be considered more preferable than the other in terms of coolness. Considering that well-established dragon lores from games like Dungeons and Dragons or Heroscape have included dragons that don't breathe fire and do spit acid, I think observers would be less likely to dock non-firebreathers down for authenticity if a scientist went with cobra acid breath instead of flame.

My biggest concern with fire breathing is the methane issue; I don't think animals could store enough methane for enough time to actually breathe impressive flame. Pressurizing the gas could help, but even the methane of cows is released in a trickle (or series of farts) instead of a big fiery explosion. Some sort of liquid might be more feasible, although again, I wouldn't expect any animal to be able to store quite enough of it to make a show. It would be simply too depressing to engineer a mechanism for fire-breath that only produced the occasional odd-smelling spark of a hiccup.

Lastly, to all those who think these discussions are unscientific, just remember: the miracles of yesterday are the commodities of tomorrow.