Name: How to Build Your Dragon
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<div class="rich-text">As the world awaited the seventh season of Game of Thrones, we started thinking—what would a real dragon look like?
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Game of Thrones got us thinking — what would a real dragon look like?

How to Build Your Dragon

<div class="rich-text">Game of Thrones got us thinking — what would a real dragon look like?</div>

Evolution

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 Onscreen
 
 : Dragons soar through our books, movies, minds.



 James Napoli
 
 : So dragons — they've continued to be popular since the dawn of human civilization.



 Onscreen
 
 : But are real dragons possible? Let's start with the wings.



 Napoli:
 
 What I would expect to see in the wings is a very, very thin but tough membrane. They would have been fairly stiff, like a bird's wing, but made of skin instead of feathers.



 Onscreen
 
 : Still, flying is hard work.



 Napoli:
 
 When animals evolved to fly, they evolved to save weight wherever they can. Dragons, the skin of their bodies would probably not be scaly, because scales are heavy. We would not see them having these long muscular tails. The necks probably would have been more thin and swan-like — again, to save weight.



 Onscreen
 
 : In other words, a real dragon would be somewhat... delicate.


 Then there are the legs.



 Napoli
 
 : A lot of dragons are depicted with six limbs, that's impossible. No terrestrial vertebrate has ever had six limbs.



 Onscreen
 
 : And as for fire breathing —



 Napoli
 
 : It's hard to make fire. The bombardier beetle is the only animal I know of that has anything that could even be described as fiery breath, and that's not quite fire, it's more of a chemical-acid mix.



 Onscreen
 
 : And that mix actually comes out of the beetle's butt.


 So what would a real dragon look like? This.


 Far-fetched? Not necessarily. 65 million years ago, pterosaurs flew among the dinosaurs.



 Napoli
 
 : Pterosaurs were very large flying reptiles. I think they're the best living or extinct model for what a mythical dragon might have been like. With large pterosaurs being the size of a small airplane, that gives us evidence that you can evolve a flying reptile to the size of a dragon.



 Onscreen
 
 : They'd just look way different than the movies.
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