The physics and biology of flying mythical beasts (feat. the yogscast) 

Simon that was a really good video!

Thanks for the video - I used to love role-play as a child, and developing mechanics for representation. Why no mention of insect wings? Also gravity variation for other realms?

You are great man Dr.simon...💜

My dream is I meet you in my life....😊

Hello, soo can you make the most realistic dragon possible?

Oh hey Turps! Didn't know you had a second channel.

lol, its hulmes

i love you!

Flammable gasses that they naturally create such as could also be contribute to their lift. I mean that bat measurement does not apply to pterodactyl does it?

Wasn't that the Discovery channel mockumentary about how dragons and dinosaurs split off at some point in the Mesozoic era and they basically had two sets of lungs one for regular breathing and another full of hydrogen gas which was used simultaneously for their fire breath ability as well as generating extra lift for flight.

me too

Tom Nicholas +

@@GianlucaTruda Most pterosaurs weighed between 180-a bit over 250kg, yes, but the largest of them in the azhdarchidae family were also extremely proficient terrestrial hunters and probably could not sustain flight for as long as a pteranodon whose wings and skeletal structure show that it was a long distance flier, spending most of it's time hunting over open waters. Some researchers even believe that the largest azhdarchidae may have even abandoned flight all together and were terrestrial bound looking at their biology. There is obviously still a chance that they could have flown, but they are heavily adapted for ground life compared to other, earlier pterosaurs.

Shoot, I just posted my thoughts on Pterodactyls before reading this

I personally don't see how pterodactyls fly with wings so oddly shaped.🤔🤔 Maybe they're look has been updated since I last saw one

I think Quetzalcoatlus is anatomy look like dragon

amir attamimi yep, especially the ones with two legs and two wings

The pectorals have to be connected somewhere in the front. If there's already pectorals, where are they supposed to connect? How can they connect to bone when other muscles are in the way? How can they have room to function if they're directly layered on top of other pectoral muscles? It'd limit motion of both and just wouldn't work. As for the prehistoric creature, they were still fair smaller than most fantasy dragons or anything like that and they had most likely, hollow bones filled with air sacs like modern day birds meaning they could most likely be easily broken by any serious hit from a blunt weapon. They had hardly any tail due to unnecessary weight being added if they had one. They mostly glided as well and some still believe they may have only glided from high up and then walked on the ground. They are believed to have taken off more like a bat I think using all four limbs rather than the usual take off pattern of birds which apparently helps too. The size of them is about the max, they can't have any thick hide or armour, or super large thick necks or tails and so on. Basically, although the degree of how often or how well they could fly is up in the air, they're most likely about the max size and weight you can be to still be able to fly and dragons and such would weigh a ton more.

@@Jhakaro your argument against duel pectorals is very flawed. How big is the body of a mythical 6 limbed creature? Answer: no one knows. The reason we don't have creatures with 4 arms is because evolution leans towards simplicity. 6 limbs would require more information to be sent to the brain, meaning more brain power is required, meaning a longer gestation and learning periods, meaning a higher likelihood of being killed off. All 4 limbed creatures can and would be able to do the same things as a 6 limbed creature. It is not because there isn't enough room - that's such a silly theory to jump to. Please look at the insect world for how many limbs can fit on a body.

Insects have an entirely different mechanical make up than any mammals or reptiles. All of the creatures in mythology are shown to either be mammal or reptile like creatures therefore the insect world has no relevance to it at all. Their bodies work differently. This entire video was about the most common creatures in fantasy that have six limbs and how they couldn't actually fly or have six limbs because of their body types. For a creature that is either a mammal or reptile, being big or small isn't going to make any difference. The pectorals have to connect to something and if there's two sets of pectorals, how and where are they meant to connect relevant to where the wings would be? You can't just place them anywhere on the body, they'd need to be in roughly the same place as a bird's but that would also be where the pectorals are for the arms or front legs and therefore there'd be no way for them to connect to the skeleton in a way that does not disrupt motor function of one or both limbs.

@@Jhakaro why do they need to be placed where birds are? Insects are relevant because they show that given opportunity other creatures with multiple limbs and configurations can exist. A dragon may not be in any way related to a mammal or a bird - that's your own precocious muddying your thought process. They could be a completely different evolutionary line. Perhaps they came from a sea creature that had reason to have 6 or 8 limbs - various fins for example. And over time two of the limbs became unused, like the vestigial limbs in snakes, and became part of the tail. Two become the back legs, two become wings with a stronger bone structure, like shoulder blades or pelvic bone, but across the mid section to support the extra muscle mass. Then finally you have two that become arms or front legs. Your argument is based on your misunderstanding of how evolution works. If there was reason for an extra set of limbs to exist on a body, then it would. Having wings to fly and arms to fight or pick things up with would be a massive advantage to any creature. But we must consider all the millions of tiny steps before that. There is a logical route between a sea creature and a dragon or any other six limbed creature if evolution had a reason to keep such limbs around during the periods where they would be less useful or cumbersome. It is not because they do not "fit", if evolution deemed them useful they would "fit" in the same way tails fit, or wings fit, or tusks fit, or horns fit, or trunks fit, or feathers fit, or elephants feet fit, or gills fit, or air sacks fit, or giraffes necks fit... Evolution makes things work if they are useful, there just hasn't yet been a use for 6 limbs.

No, a dragon as shown in fiction is usually a mammal or reptile like creature. You can make up some form of insect dragon or something if you want, nobody's stopping you but as depicted in nearly all folklore and media, they could not use six limbs and fly especially at the size they show them to be in most fiction. A set of extra limbs can exist if there's a reason, perhaps...but clearly there isn't a reason, whatsoever for any known mammals or reptiles as far as I am aware. Besides genetic mishaps, no mammals or reptiles have more than four limbs to my current knowledge. There's no reason for a dragon as depicted in most media to even fly or especially breathe fire, even if it was theoretically possible. They'd be apex predators. There'd be no point. If you had small little draconic creatures, they might fly or somehow develop poison spitting or fire breathing like a bombardier beetle (still very unlikely) due to their need for a self defense mechanism if they're otherwise too small and tiny or weak to fend for themselves against larger creatures that hunt them. But a big ass dragon like game of thrones wouldn't need any of it. Even their metabolism would be through the roof causing them to overheat and die trying to fly with all that weight, if they could even get off the ground. Just not energy efficient at all. The amount of food needed to move six limbs at once too as well as fly with all that added weight? They'd have gone extinct before they ever got off the ground...literally. Arms or front legs would just be extra weight and mostly dead weight restricting them from flying anyway. There'd be absolutely no need for it. Most dragons aren't shown to be able to actually use their front legs for anything but walking and why would a dragon need to walk much when they can fly? They'd spend most of their time lounging or flying/gliding with short bursts of extended ground activity such as walking. Walking would be slower and pointless to a creature that can fly like that besides to land and snatch prey or eat or move into a nest etc. "there just hasn't been a use for 6 limbs" Yeah, because there is no use for it in such creatures. Not even dinosaurs had them hundreds of millions of years ago. So as far as modern biology is concerned, on an Earth like planet, there is no use for them at all, therefore they won't develop. Is it impossible? Maybe not, but highly improbable. The entire body structure of mammals and reptiles would have to change to fit it but as seen in media, they haven't changed the biology accordingly in any way that makes sense. Your theory is like saying, well why wouldn't nature just make self levitating creatures using electromagnetism? Just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean it can't exist which is technically true but it's extremely highly improbable to the point of just saying, no, there's no foreseeable way it could happen.

The tail would add about 200 kg of added weight to the dragon going off the absolute insane length of most dragon's tails in fantasy. It'd be absolutely pointless and cause them to be unable to fly if anything. The largest known creature to have ever been able to fly, the Quetzalcoatlus Northropi, had practically no tail whatsoever when compared to dragon's as often depicted.

They shared all the evolutionary adaptions that birds employ for flight including pneumatic skeleton and respiratory system, employed a bat style hand wing and the largest discovered so far was Quetzalcoatlus who was about the size of an f16 with a wingspan of about 11 to 13 m they stood about as tall as a giraffe but only weighed a few hundred kg. Computer models of their physiology suggest they could launch into flight from a standstill, fly at 130kph at heights up to 15000 feet, and stay aloft for up to a week with a range of over 13000 km. I can't believe he made this video without referencing the Pterosaurs..... By the way, any of the silly arguments that they couldn't fly are just dumb, nature doesn't encumber a creature with a 13m wingspan to have it waddle around on the ground, they would have gone extinct before they ever evolved. Anyway, a plane-sized airborne predator that could literally bite us in half sounds a lot like a dragon to me.

@@1bucketman Lmao thank you for this reply 2 years later, that was a nice read. It sounds like a sight I'd marvel at all the while being terrified with the possibility of it swooping down to snatch me up for baby food.

😳 Ye gods! Hadn't caught up with the more recent discoveries on this one. 11-13m wingspan?? 😱 All the dino illustrations of my childhood only showed something about the size of a pelican - had no idea the largest discovered were now basically Cessna-sized!! Given their head shape, wing structure etc they'd certainly make good dinosaur analogues...?

One point to note on this is I believe there was a higher oxygen concentration in the atmosphere at the time

Tbh, me too

The only issue I ever had with this explanation was where it kept all that hydrogen when not in use. In the movie, they're shown to expand rapidly and take off quickly. But this implies that 1: they're creating the gas on demand at an alarming rate. Or 2: They're keeping it compressed in their bodies until needed. The first option really asks a lot of biology. Dissolving bone or rock can get you that hydrogen alright. But you'll need epic levels of hydrochloric acid in order to make enough gas quickly enough. Producing that much acid is going to be demanding in calories and raw materials. Making it a questionable way to survive. More so when the dragons are clearly big enough to be apex predators without flight. Evolution (if it can even be applied to dragons) would favor the loss of flight entirely. The second option is even more troubling to me. As not only does the animals internal storage have to be massively strong ( consuming calories all the while) to compress and store the gas. But in the moment of expansion it's going to experience dramatic temperature loss. I'm not a smart enough person to say this with any confidence. But maybe enough to cause real freezing damage to it's internal structure. All that out of the way. Dickinsons book depicts a world where magic very much does (or did) exist. It's implied by the story that dragons hail from a time where such forces were common place and don't fit in a world where they are not. So his explanations regarding dragon flight are fun in and of themselves. They're prolly not useful in fully describing the phenomenon in it's entirety.

if you scale with the square root of weight to a cougar, you get ~18m, and linearly you get 60M both would probably give enough height to take off enough to not hit obstacles if they can maintain horizontal flight.

I missed being here too! Back for good now though :)

Thank you so much!

Yeah, true :0 I remember a documentary where they put what hypothetical life would be like on other planets. And one of those beings were like whales but what they explained is that the density was much lower on that planet so they could stay in the air without any problem.

One thing is to use mollors to bring rock kind of like a flint and steel

I had the same thought about pterosaurs while watching the video, though their wing structure might be more bird-like, given the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.

You mean birds?

Vampyricon I think the size differences between birds and pterosaurs make them worth looking into separately.

Yeah, like, it would make sense if they flew like birds given the evolutionary link, but I honestly don't know exactly how different their wing structure was or how big the largest ones were.

@@ProfTeak The latgest one (Quetzalcoatlus) had wingspans of up to 12 meters but it is estimated to have weighed 200-250 kg so much lower than traditional dragons or wyverns.

Pterosaurs*

It's my family's summer holiday spot too! That's how I learned about Durrell. Quite possibly my favourite place on Earth

Simon Clark couldn’t agree more it’s such a wonderful place.

This is a rollercoaster of a comment...and I love it!!

I will point out, dragonflies and other insects have different musculature thanks to their not having a back bone. The missing vertebrae make for a lot more room for muscles on the back, as well and a nearly negligent weight.

Insect biomechanics are far different than mammal or reptile mechanics. Also insects are, at least today, super tiny and weigh next to nothing and despite some ancient insects being like a meter or more in size and having essentially six limbs or more, like I said, their biomechanics are different. If you think you know more than people who've studied it for years that's been peer reviewed and accepted as more than likely a biological impossibility, then I don't know what to tell you. Could it be possible somewhere in the universe? Probably. Is it possible based on known biology and our current understanding of physics here on earth? No.

I now think I should have added the word "joke" in capital letters, just in case.

Obviously the entire part after the word "bollocks" was a joke. The first part didn't seem like it was necessarily a joke.

That was entirely my fault - he had a lav mic on, but my recorder was recording a different track. D'oh!

All round nerd