DRAGONS IN THE DARK

There’s a lot of hanging about in plays. Waiting to come on, as it were. You wait to exit the real world and enter the world of make-believe. From 74 to 47 and back again. Actually I’m not 74, as anyone paying attention would know, but nor am I 47 either. I just look like that.

So the question arises what do you do? While you are waiting. In the dark. You sit there in the wings or in the bar. You can’t talk for fear of disturbing the actors on stage. And reading is difficult (even if the lights weren't out!) because you are so full of adrenalin that it is coming out of your ears. Someone might run you through with a sword and you wouldn’t notice. I guess it must be like that in a battle. There you are fighting away and suddenly you notice that there seems to be a lot of blood around and then you fancy a sit down and before you know it you are dead.

I suppose it’s the same if you're eaten by wild animals. I doubt if you’d actually feel very much. I used to have a dream as a child in which I was lost in the jungle and a tiger appeared just as I had sat down to eat my sandwiches. Now, I knew that I could run, was a very good runner in fact, but the problem was I had inconveniently forgotten how. Which leg goes first? What? You take both legs off the ground at the same time? Without falling over?

This dream used to terrify me. The only comforting thing was that the tiger seemed to have forgetten how to run too. And so it just hung there in mid spring, as it were, terrifying the living daylights out of paralysed me until I woke up. Which I always did, covered in sweat.

One day I said to myself that, as an experiment, I wouldn’t try to run but would let the tiger catch me to see what it felt like. But the tiger then just refused to play and I had another dream instead. Perhaps I was older because this one involved stealing cars.

One moment I would be admiring a car and the next I would be driving it down the road. Or rather, since I was too young to drive, being in the uncomfortable position of sitting in the driving seat of a moving car of uncertain provenance with legs too short to reach the pedals and about to crash and of course the certainty of being arrested by policemen all with loud shoutey voices and truncheons. But of course I woke up. First.

You think of these things, waiting to go on. In the darkness. Reaching back into the memory I remembered last week I had blogged about a donkey called Pegasus, the original winged horse. Now winged horses are one of only two families of land animals with six limbs - if you don’t count insects, or spiders, or any arthropod come to that. Winged horses are beautiful but apart from Disney films there’s not much evidence that they existed at all. I have a suspicion that someone with imagination may have been telling fibs. It’s the feathers and hair on the same beast that give the game away.

So if there aren’t any winged horses that just leaves dragons, for which evidence is plentiful. In fact it seems as though the six limbed dragon (four legs, two wings) only died out in recent times. Still, owing to the beast's ability to bury itself in the ground and hibernate for excessively long periods you never know, one may yet come to light yet.

Most of what we know about dragons comes from the discovery of the remains of a whole family of dragons in a collapsed limestone cave at Llancofi in Carmarthenshire in 1882. Perfectly preserved and mummified. Examination of the stomach contents showed the beasts to be entirely vegetarian, contrary to popular suspicion that they would go a long way for a succulent morsel of young damsel. No, entirely vegetarian was your dragon but their digestive system was primitive and they produced a lot of methane (or so the researchers concluded) which the animal then belched out of its mouth.

So it seems likely that this is the origin of the fire-breathing legend, particularly as the dragons’ teeth were not made of calcium orthophosphate like those of other animals but of the iron compound, haematite. Such teeth were rather primitive but fast growing. They were also quite soft so dragons tended to get stones and grit stuck between their teeth. This was a noted feature of all the adult dragons found in the Llancofi cave.

Now if a dragon bit on a stone, the haematite would spark. If at the same time the dragon were belching methane, it would ignite. The researchers at Llancofi found distinctive scorch marks and thickening of the skin on the older dragons' noses.

As a defence mechanism this flame throwing ability would have been matchless and probably accounts for the dragon surviving so long down the evolutionary tree.

Interestingly the young dragons did not appear to have this fire-breathing capability. There was no evidence of scorching on their noses. The young unusually were also covered in hair as opposed to the scales of the older beasts. Their wings were larger in proportion and so they would have been able to fly, unlike the older dragons which, being heavier and covered with thick scales could probably not have got off the ground. The researchers concluded that this change from hair to scales and the almost complete loss of aerial ability occurred around the age of 40.

The most likely reason for the dragons’ eventual demise would have been its great destructive power, particularly in dry weather when it must accidentally have set ablaze whole fields of carefully cultivated crops. So almost certainly the beasts were hunted to extinction by man to protect their livelihoods.

The remains at Llancofi were dated to approximately 600 AD. They would therefore have been some of the last dragons to have lived in this remote corner of Wales.

I’d tell you more about dragons and what they found at Llancofi but I am already hearing my cue lines and so I’d better go on. If you have been, thanks for sharing this wait in the darkness.


Picture shows a sculpture of a dragon based on the remains of a larger dragon found at Llancofi. Note the relatively small size and scaly wings which in older dragons were useless for flight.