Everyone loves dragons. They are these magical beings of beauty and fear that everyone knows of in one form or another.  From the Chinese to the European dragons can do the impossible from flying to breathing fire. They are fanatasy beings but are they really impossible?

Naturally and in this time period dragons are almost completely impossible. A basic part of life on earth is the food chain. As a side effect of the food chain carnivores are always smaller the herbivores. In addition, there are no creatures in world that can breath fire. The nearest thing to what we consider a dragon is a creature called the Komodo Dragon. They are giant lizards but not nearly the size of what dragons are suppose to be. These creatures do not even fly.

However, a few millions years ago dragons could have been possible. In those times all creatures were huge so giant lizards like T-rex’s existed due to the oxygen levels. So a giant lizard that can fly similar to a pterodactyl is possible. However, how do we deal with the fire breathing part of the dragon equation. Simple, there are species of lizard that spew venom and gaseous material. So this couples with some sort of igniter like the electric current found in certain eels or even certain other chemicals could have created make fire breath.

In the end though a real dragon now a day is not only unlikely but impossible. If there is to be a dragon we would have to make one form personally designed. This is not completely possible now a days but in the future when we have perfected designer DNA we can make anything. It is a little amoral but an interesting idea.

Sources

http://www.pnas.org/content/98/25/14518.short

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/4441021a.html

http://www.evolutionary-ecology.com/abstracts/v04/1466.html

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40465957?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi802324w