If dragons were real, how might fire-breathing work? “A dragon could draw on some chemistry used by the bombardier beetle. This insect has evolved reservoirs adapted to store hydrogen peroxide…”
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Discussion 1 comment
This reminded me of a wonderful book I read as a kid, The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson and Wayne Anderson. It's beautifully illustrated and went into all sorts of nerdy detail about how dragons might fly, and breath fire. The conclusions were similar—basically dragons created hydrogen gas by some chemical reaction involving acid and calcium which made them buoyant enough to fly and allowed them to breath fire (but also made them susceptible to Hindenberg-esque disasters and caused them to dissolve when they died—hence no skeletons!).
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