If you have been following the paleontology blogs, I am sure you have heard about recent discoveries and exciting theories. It is sort of a hobby of mine that has been on the back burner. I enjoy collecting fossils. My area of the world is where you can find Devonian era fossils pretty easily. I was spoiled as a kid to go out walking through fields on the farm and finding all kinds of interesting rocks. The running joke in my parents' household was that my room was going to crash down into the one below if I found more rocks. To no one's surprise, I took my rock collection with me off to college and went fossil hunting while I was at college. I donated one of the best samples in my collection to the college's fossil exhibit.
Now, one may wonder what my love of fossils has to do with fantasy creatures like dragons. The old stories of dragons in Europe were based on the discovery of dinosaur fossils. These people tried to make sense of what was discovered and from here was the European dragon lore born. I have a love of mythology and folklore. It is part of the fuel for my fantasy series. The dragons of Evandar are heavily influenced by European dragon lore.
As I thought about it all, I realized pretty early on that my dragons were going to have some aerodynamics problems. While I could just say 'it is fiction and doesn't matter!' I really felt like I had to address them. It doesn't come up in the books at this time because it's all background material and there's no reason for it to be at the forefront of the storyline. This lead me to study birds, bats, and bugs to figure out how they managed to stay up in the air. While the fossil record indicated that many of the dinosaurs discovered in Europe had a heavy bone structure, I realized that my dragons needed a bone structure like birds.
For a brief moment, I considered if they had feathers but I fell back to the old concept of webbed wings like what you see in bats. The dinosaur concept that I grew up with was that they had scales and they were more like lizards than birds. (More evidence is showing they were more like birds. It's really neat to read about.) I then had the question of how do they fly and how do they stay in the air? That piece of the puzzle didn't fall into place for a long while. Then I read about humming birds. The way they hover in the air is by flapping their wings in a figure 8 motion. This allows them to have greater ability to move in any direction. I knew this immediately was the answer to the question of how dragons fly.
I am planning on inserting a scene where the principle characters are dealing with a dragon in flight and the challenges of confronting one. All of this research and planning is going to make for a really awesome scene to write that I know I'm going to have fun working on.
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