Dragons

I don't know if anyone here likes dragons (other than me, and I think RW), but tomorrow (Sunday) evening, Animal Planet is going to have a program about dragons.

Animal Planet website for Dragons

I just thought I'd bring it up incase someone might be interested but hadn't heard about it yet.

I missed that!

It wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be. A good portion of it, the part dealing with trying to dream up a scientific explanation to dragon flight and firebreath, I have encoutered before with slightly different details many years ago in an old cartoon movie called Flight of Dragons.

Other than that, it was typical Animal Planet what-if story creation similar to what they've done with some of their dinosaur and million years hence evolution specials.

Probably the biggest thing that got an ooo from me was that it was narrated by Patrick Stewart.

A good portion of it, the part dealing with trying to dream up a scientific explanation to dragon flight and firebreath...

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Yeah, I was kinda surprised that they even attempted to address it, because their explanation came off as a little hokey to me. The special made it seem as though platinum was as plentiful as water and that dragons simply scouped it up like ice cream. A better explanation to me would be that dragons produce chemicals that they spew from their mouths at high velocities that ignite when combined or some such thing. The one thing that I did like about their scientific explanation, however, was how they tied the fire-breathing ability with the flight ability ... although I didn't like the whole hydrogen bladder thing. And the explanation of how they survived the dinosaur-killer meteor left me with some questions. All that said, however, I liked the special. I'd like to see something similar with Bigfoot, Unicorns and other mythical animals.

To light hydrogen is easy you just need a spark. One of the problems with the body is getting rid of static electricity, so producing a spark is not difficult - just rub two things together.

Hydrogen can be produced by the electrolysis of water using platinum as a catalyst and/or electrode. There are also plenty of chemical processes that liberate hydrogen from organic matter. Like everything else in the body they can use proteins as catalysts.

To light hydrogen is easy you just need a spark. One of the problems with the body is getting rid of static electricity, so producing a spark is not difficult - just rub two things together.

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Which is why I don't understand why they came up with the whole platinum explanation. No offense, but I just can't see Dragons mining for rare minerals.

It's been a while since I last watched the old cartoon movie Flight of Dragons, but in it, I think the dragons ate limestone or some other rock (something much more common than platinum), and their bodies chemically converted it to helium or hydrogen (I can't remember which), which they used in internal air bladders to lighten themselves for flight, and then exhaled past a gland thing in their mouths which provided an eletrical spark in the path of the exhaled gas ignited the gas.

I like that explanation better than the one in the special. I'll have to check that out, if I can find it. Hopefully they'll have it on Netflix.

The story in Flight of Dragons is more typical fantasy than the more real-animal way the Animal Planet special did it. The dragons can talk and there's plenty of magic, but the science they put into the flight and fire of the dragons came from a book.

From what I've read, the story of the movie comes from a book by Gordon R. Dickson called The Dragon And The George, but the science they used in the movie for dragon flight and fire comes from a book by Peter Dickinson called The Flight Of Dragons, which isn't a story but just a look at dragons from an imagine-if-they-were-real perspective similar to the initial thought process that spawned the Animal Planet special.