Setting & Evolution

A World of Dragons

The effects of such an arms race can be seen today: except for the coldest and most remote areas, the world is almost free of big mammalian predators. Despite some early attempts at competing with dragons, now the biggest felines are the lynxes and similar sized cats. Canids, meanwhile, rarely exceed the size of coyotes, and modern bear species are smaller even than moderately sized breeds of dogs. Further north, certain species of arctic wolf and bear thrive by remaining far away from the habitats of wyrms and dragons.

In the skies, birds of prey faced substantial predation ever since dragons became airborne, having to become smaller and adapting for speed and maneuverability to survive. In Europe, a unique lineage of dragons, the wyverns, completely outcompeted birds of prey. Plants all over the world, for their part, have adapted their flowers and fruits in order to resemble prey and attract flying dragons, and take advantage of them as both pollinizers and seed dispersers. In the seas, things are not any better. In a world where enormous sea serpents roam the oceans, whales and ships fall prey to their appetite quite often. Closer to the coasts, smaller species of serpent have had to compete with crocodiles, which still reign supreme wherever they have managed to keep their hold. Almost wherever we turn our sight, dragons remain a fixture of Earth’s ecosystems, and humanity has done its best to learn how to live with them, to survive and thrive beneath the shadows of these creatures.

As we now know, the age of the dragons did not begin with winged shadows racing across the sky, but with a humble creature hiding from the stomping claws of giants. The first Dracosauria were small, generalist reptiles that descended from bigger theropod dinosaurs near the end of the mesozoic era. Quite unlike their ancestors, these Dracosaurs became quadrupedal and close to the ground, with a body better adapted for burrowing and surviving inside caves and tunnels.

Covered in a short, furry coat, these reptiles were best characterized by the development of two short bone horns covered in hard scales positioned near the back of the skull, which would remain a diagnostic character across the history of the clade. While these horns originally evolved to signal their good health and deter competitors without need of a fight, they would eventually evolve into much more. Completely carnivorous, the first Dracosaurs would hunt any prey small enough for them, from small mammals to the young of bigger species of dinosaur.

As the age of the dinosaurs drew to an end, these dragon ancestor survived thanks to their generalist lifestyle and underground caves and burrows, inside which they best resisted the aftermath of the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. As they emerged, the descendants of these dinosaurs found a world free of competition, where they could easily fill their new role as the biggest predators in the land.