Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real
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Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real is a special that first showed on Animal Planet, and narrated by Patrick Stewart.
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[edit] Plot
This movie documents what course of action would be taken if a dead dragon was discovered, as well as the possible lifestyles of dragonkind. It presents the story as historical, though at the end it is revealed that the scenario is a mock-up, a might-have-been.
The story begins at London Museum of Natural History and Science, London, England where a young palaeontologist discovers talon marks on a skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and shares this discovery with other palaeontologists. Those were left by a creature unknown to science. However, it was not the talons that killed it; a blast of fire did, as evidenced by carbon marks discovered on the side of its skull. The programme then switches to 65 million years ago, when a Tyrannosaurus saw a figure of a creature in the distance. Something had been raiding his territory and the food had been scarce. He had not eaten in days. The figure is slowly revealed to be a young prehistoric dragon. The Tyrannosaurus went on the offensive while the young dragon attempted to defend itself by extending its wings to give illusion that it was much larger than it really was. Not deterred by the bluff, the Tyrannosaurus remained on the offensive. The young dragon's next attempt at defending itself was to produce a piercing scream that carried for miles. Even this incredibly painful screech did not get the Tyrannosaurus to back off, so the dinosaur began to attack, but the young dragon counterattacked with a headbutt on the Tyrannosaurus's chin. The mother of the juvenile dragon came to the rescue and scratched the forehead of the Tyrannosaurus with its talons, to which Tyrannosaurus responded with a headbutt in her chest. The mother dragon continued to scratch causing the Tyrannosaurus to bite her wing, tearing it apart. The dragon then breathed fire on the dinosaur, injuring it. The Tyrannosaurus did not last the night after being hit by the streaming blaze. The mother was also fatally injured. With the broken wing, she could not fly to feed herself or her offspring.
Back in the present, the palaeontologist is studying the photos of a new discovery at Romania. The story of this discovery began at the Carpathian Mountains when explorers stumbled upon something amazing and called the police. The police sent two detectives to investigate the mystery. The detectives moved into the cave and discovered human corpses. When they moved deeper into the cave, they saw what appeared to be a carcass of a dragon. The palaeontologist is sent to Romania to figure out the mystery of the carcass and its origin.
While trying to discover more about the dragon, the team of scientists have unearthed a whole dragon family tree consisting of the Prehistoric Dragon mentioned above, a different species of dragon called the Marine Dragon along with the descendants of the Marine Dragon, the Forest Dragon and Mountain Dragon.
Back in the past, several weeks after the battle with the Tyrannosaurus, the young dragon had a problem: his mother was dead thanks to the fatal wound on her wing. Without his mother to hunt for him he too would die.
A by-product of symbiotic bacteria in the intestines of dragons after feeding is hydrogen gas, which is 14 times less dense than air. It is then channeled into their flight bladders which reduces a dragon's overall density to the point which it can fly. However, the young dragon did not have enough hydrogen in its flight bladders, and thus could not fly or hunt. To make matters worse, the scent of his mother's carcass attracted scavengers, although by eating meat from it kept him alive for a few days. As the scavengers gathered, the young dragon realized he had to learn fast. Among the scavengers was the most dangerous creature on earth at that time, an alpha male dragon. The young dragon ran for his life while the alpha male pursued him. The young dragon's body was working overtime, causing hydrogen to collect at a phenomenal rate. As the young dragon continued to run, he emptied his stomach, thereby reducing his weight and spread his wings, taking off and thus escaping from the male dragon.
[edit] Featured Dragons
In this documentary, four dragons are explored. These are the Prehistoric Dragon, Marine Dragon, Forest Dragon, and Mountain Dragon. There was however a very brief reference to a Desert Dragon, but the documentary did not go into exploring that dragon.
Prehistoric Dragon
As mentioned above, the Prehistoric Dragon existed about the same time as the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex. These Cretaceous dragons were the largest flying animals ever to have lived. The prehistoric dragon descended from a group of aquatic or semiaquatic dragons that occupied coastal swamps approximately 200 million years ago in the late Triassic, which gave rise to both marine and terrestrial species. Initially, the terrestrial dragons were quadrupedal, running on all fours and unable either to fly or to breathe fire. One species evolved the ability to run bipedally, on its hind legs. This enabled further evolution of the forelegs, which were no longer used for standing or running. These limbs eventually evolved into wings, making flight possible. This parallels almost exactly the evolution of birds with flight ability from small, bipedal dinosaurs.
At some stage — and there is no fossil evidence on this point to date — dragons harnessed active gut bacteria to produce hydrogen. This made it possible for dragons to escape the size restrictions of bird and bat flight, and to evolve into the largest flying animals ever to exist, challenging one of the largest known carnivore on land at the time, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Subsequently, dragons ingested inorganic minerals, such as platinum, sparking the catalytic ignition of its gut-produced hydrogen. The potent weapon of fire-breathing was added to the dragon's armory: the prehistoric dragon had arrived.
Marine Dragon
Before prehistoric dragons, some of the early dragon species were aquatic or semiaquatic, foraging in coastal swamps and the shallow sea, living, in fact, rather like modern crocodiles. When a cataclysmic mass extinction (the KT extinction) occurred about 65 million years ago, eliminating dinosaurs and terrestrial prehistoric dragons, these aquatic dragons survived. A fortuitous mutation gave these dragons a third pair of limbs, supplementing the previous two and making them a new unique kind of vertebrate, i.e., a six-limbed animal.
Some of these new dragons recolonized the land, occupying a world vacated by dinosaurs and earlier dragons. In these terrestrial dragons, the supplementary limbs evolved into the fully functional wings of flying dragons. Other dragons stayed aquatic, specializing more and more in marine food resources — crustaceans, fish, turtles — caught in shallow coastal waters. As time passed, they adapted to a fully aquatic life, the rudimentary wings becoming fins.
The clawed limbs of terrestrial dragons were of little use in catching fish, so these evolved into flippers, like those of modern turtles. Fish were trapped in the dragon's jaws, which became larger and longer over the course of generations, and their jaws were armed with large numbers of spike-like teeth for holding their slippery prey. Wings, of course, were useless impediments in the water, and eventually dwindled and disappeared. The most celebrated example of the sea dragon may be the Loch Ness Monster.
Forest Dragon
Forest dragons lived in thick woods and bamboo thickets. They retained the long, sinuous body form of their aquatic ancestors, a useful adaptation to moving rapidly through almost impenetrable jungle vegetation. They retained the ability to swim, and in hot weather, or to escape such dangers as forest fires, could still return to rivers.
These forest-living dragons had short wings, and were incapable of true flight. They were, however, capable of prodigious leaps: by curling their body in a plane to make a near-aerofoil shape (like some present-day "flying snakes"), producing extra lift from their small wings, and reducing their weight with hydrogen-filled flight bladders like those of the prehistoric dragon, these creatures were able to cover significant aerial distances.
Some descendants of these forest dragons expanded beyond the thicket to forage in open country, evolving into the magnificent Chinese dragon, D. sinensis, and a subpopulation of D. sinensis, isolated in the Japanese archipelago, the Japanese dragon, D. japonicus.
Mountain Dragon
The mountain dragon is so called because in medieval times, it was restricted largely to mountains and other remote habitats. The name is, however, slightly inappropriate since the species was much more widespread in lowland forests and was not restricted to mountains before the pressures of agriculture and a burgeoning human population restricted its habitat.
Like all post-Cretaceous dragons, mountain dragons had six limbs: a pair of wings in addition to two pairs of legs, the result of an advantageous developmental mutation that occurred after the extinction of the two-legged, two-winged prehistoric dragon.
The mountain dragon's body was relatively short compared with that of the marine dragon; however, a shorter body is essential for flight, where a long flexible vertebral column is a disadvantage. The tail was approximately as long as the body, with a razor-sharp arrowhead-shaped structure that could be used as a defensive weapon. A sideswipe from a dragon's tail could sever a man's arm.
