THE flight OF DRAGONS
THE flight OF DRAGONS
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While other members of their kind took to dominating land and sea, some dragons were much more ambitious, finding a way to rule over the skies instead. This process, however, was not easily achieved. While modern flying dragons come in all shapes and sizes, they all come from a single ancestor that was as different to them as they are now to each other. The early ancestors of flying dragons were small, tree dwelling creatures that diverged from primitive Drakes. Their limbs were long and strong, adapted for moving along the branches, hunting small animals and escaping the attention of larger terrestrial predators. However, tree dwelling animals could be hard to catch, especially as birds began radiating and dominating this environment. Flying prey were harder to catch than lizards and bugs, and these dragons would have to adapt in order to keep developing as predators.
Gliding membranes
Gliding membranes
This adaptation began with the development of a thin skin membrane that extended between the anterior and posterior limbs of these creatures. As with many creatures in our world, including draco lizards and many mammals, this membrane helped these ancestral dragons leap and glide between the treetops. This added capacity for movement allowed the ancestral flying dragons to not only catch prey in the air, but also gave them a chance to expand, to reach new spaces and environments without having to touch the ground.
Their second adaptation was a couple of large sacs developed from their digestive system, inside which gas by-products from digestion, including small amounts of methane, were stored. The sac helped reduce the weight of these creatures in a similar manner to the hollow bones of birds, thus improving their mobility as they glided.
Symbiotic bacteria
Symbiotic bacteria
As these creatures expanded and developed, one particular population developed an adaptation that would help them outcompete all others of their kind. These dragons developed a symbiotic relationship with specialized bacteria, modernly named Methanobacterium. These bacteria live in the digestive system of these dragons, and of all their modern descendants, where they help process the meat ingested by the dragon. Similar bacteria were already common to the clade, as by helping in digestion they allowed a general reduction of the digestive system, which made the ancestral flying dragons lighter and allowed more space for their flotation sacs to develop. However, what makes Methanobacteria special, as their name may suggest, is the heavily increased production of methane as a secondary output. This methane slowly accumulated in the sacs of these dragons and, being much lighter than air, helped them leave mere gliding behind and attaining real flight. As these dragons became lighter, their gliding membranes evolved into more complex structures,
further evolution
further evolution
As the first flying dragons started quickly migrating and diversifying in the rest of the world, they reached places untouched by most other kinds of dragon, such as the Americas. Nowadays, flying dragons can be found all across Europe, Asia and North and South America, and have diverged into two very different superorders, those that we will focus on as we go forward in the exploration of this World of Dragons: clade Dracomorpha (left) and clade Caeloserpens (right).
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