Are dragons birds, or are they mammals?

Successful chimera of everything.
If you are talking about D&D dragons, read Draconomicon.

>their own kingdom
Slow down, cowboy!

>Poor Little Primate Boy

This brings memories of an old comedy show that had a sketch about a group of knights who killed dragons to sell their meat.

They are their own class of animals. Six limbs, laying eggs, warm blooded but at least the same level of intelligence as humans.

Neither, it goes like:

>Mammalia
>Aves
>Reptlia
>Whatever fish are...
>Draconia

Didnt the 2e Draconomicon answer all these questions?
I seem to remember fully detailed drawings of skeletal structure and all that fun stuff....
Off to my library to see if that's the right book

>Class Draconia
Belong to the Chordata Phylum: Warm blood, scales, egg based reproduction, 4 chambered heart. 4 fingers per limb plus a dewclaw.

Most Draconia creatures have six limbs, but in some cases, a pair of them can have evolved to become merely vestigial.

Most known orders:
>Iveria
Wyverns and Drakes, forelegs become vestigal, high developt wing, usually good fliers with loner behavior.

>Verus Dracus
Literally true dragons, most of the fully formed six limbed dragons, but also include pseudo-dragons.

>Serpens
No visible external limbs, or just wings.

This is starting to sound like Monster Hunter. Which is totally fine by me.

Don't forget Longs:
>Sinodraco
Serpentine bodies, no wings, use magic for flight.

Considering that they have 6 limbs i say they are an early branch of reptiles that split of together with mammals but are a sepparate group.

Shouldn't this be a Familie within Serpens? they seem to have the same overall morphology

No.
Those are Ichtio-Dracus

Dragons that grow from a fish-like larva form, to amphibious horned serpentine form to a four-legged serpentine lung as they age.

They fly by using a magical sediment that gathers in the form of pearls arround their necks.
These pearls allow them to manipulate lightning and electromagnetic fields.

Dragons are for loving and protecting.

Based Laius dropping truth bombs left and right.

Depends. Is the lizard a proto-mammal from the Synapsid family line?

Dragons are known to have many evolutionary spinoffs as well, Griffons, basalisks, cockatrices, and the sapient kobolds are theorized to be evolved from scaled and plumed draconis ancestors

>their own kingdom

You mean their own class?

Dragons are for rape.

>their own kingdom.

WHAT

There was a Disney movie about that too.

The problem with trying to outline the dragon taxonomy is that it will be very setting dependent. For instance, in PF lung dragons are one of the true dragon types and called Imperial. However, D&D has a fuckton of different dragon types from small dragonets to drakes to wyverns and linnorms and a whole bunch of other types.

>Griffons, basalisks, cockatrices,
>dragons
Uh, how about no. Unless this is the WItchers sometimes shitty lore.

Mammals.

No, that's Elves. get your fantasy right.

>kingdom

Dragons aren't animals, cool.

Elves = the rapees
Dragons = the rapers

They're magic.

neither, they are Archosaurs like Crocodilians, Pterasours, and non-Avian Dinosaurs,
youtu.be/bTWmoKRkxC4?t=32s

Are you implying Avian Dinosaurs *aren't* Archosaurs?

Because that renders the whole of Archosauria paraphyletic, and we can't have that now can we?

Certainly chordates, but not tetrapods. Meaning they descended from something other than fish. Perhaps they're some kind of hagfish?

technically they are insectoid bats

>cassowaries are only half the height of a human

Nigger they lay shelled eggs that don't desiccate outside of water, that makes them amniotes and amniotes are sub-clade of tetrapods

Unless you are arguing for convergent evolution between dragons and all other amniotes (reptiles/birds/mammals) in which case you have a pretty big parsimony problem unless you have a mountain of evidence proving convergence

They clearly have six limbs, which exclude them from tetrapoda.

Couldn't the wings just be an evolutionary divergence that caused the anterior pair of limbs to grow into two, while far enough down the tetrapod line as to be included there?

my bad, I forgot that the whole of Avemetatarsalia are Archosaurs.

In most of the setting that I have done where Dragons exist, they are fire breathing Utahraptors with wings.

perfect height to rip your balls off with their claws.

I just prefer to omit six-limbed draconids from my settings completely. Wurms, wyverns, and lungs all sit neatly as archosaurs, but six-limbed dragons would need to have undergone a mutation and somehow survived and bred with either an extra accidental pair of gimpy limbs, or half their forelimb bones divided into two pairs. That or they're not tetrapods.

Neither. I always have dragons fit here:

>Class - Reptilia
>Subclass - Archosauria
>Infraclass - Dracosuchia (cousins of the Pseudosuchias, which are crocodilians, and Ornithosuchia, which are dinosaurs and pterosaurs)
>Orders - diverts into land-based, sea-based, air-based from here

Or... their ribs adapted to create wings.

They're buff snakes. All snakes gain a feature from the list every hundred years they manage to survive.

Dragons evolved from cobras?

more like this
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(genus)

>Serpens

Pic related?

Fuck that noise.

Dragons are living concepts, less than gods but ore than beasts.

Their bodies amalgams of real biology forcibly merged and reinforced by raw magic to contain the essence and perform their role expected of them, as such various regions sees various dragons.

Their lifespans as long as their legends, invulnerable to all but fabled weapons, legendary heroes or clever tales.

>Uh, how about no. Unless this is the WItchers sometimes shitty lore.

You mean the original Chainmail lore?

Dragons were created by Tiamat to vengance on the gods for murdering her mate. They're simultaneously magical and reptiles.

She also created Sphinxes, Hydras, Merfolk, Scorpionmen, Centaurs, Storm Demons, Giants, and more. She was the mother of monsters.

Cephalopods.

I don't know where to use Coatl and where to use Dragons, and what meaningful and thematic differences I can use for either.

>Pseudosuchia
>"fake crocodiles"
>actually contains crocodiles
lol biologists

I've been doing quite a bit of thinking about dragons recently, I'm glad this thread came up.

I imagine them as six-limbed dinosaurs, something shaped like a very large raptor (Can't be meaty like a t-rex because it needs to fly - also probably hollow-boned) with bat-like wings (Feathery ones if you like that more, as it'd make more sense).

I was thinking about how they'd hunt and fight recently, taking into account they'd be a pretty smart animal if you didn't make them outright sapient. I figured the fire breath would be a kind of last resort, like an octopus's ink, which they'd use rarely for offense and more to keep attackers off of them. I thought they'd be more like hit-and-run style attackers since they could just swoop by and slash with their talons or whatever and then fly off. Fighting head-to-head would probably go poorly since they're probably a little fragile, due to the hollow bones.

Oh, meant to ask what you guys through about that sort of thing. Normally I don't go too in-detail about the scientific qualities of mythological beings, but I really wanted dragons to make sense.

And yet neither of those are considered dragons in any other edition after the shit proto D&D was scrapped in favor of actual D&D.

Dude, dragons are mammals in some settings, or closer to mammals than other reptiles, like user here said In Monster Hunter some "dragons" have fur and ears. They are not mammals, but they are way closer to mammals than a dinosaur would be.

Reptiles are paracladistic

>6 limbs
>hard outer shell
>lay eggs

Obviously insects

In monster hunter most things are called Wyverns of some class. Some of those are closer to dinosaurs, some are closer to mammals, some are closer to fish.

There's an entire separate class for true dragons in monster hunter. It also isn't the best example when Dragon is also an element.

Yeah, but dragon wings are NOTHING like that. They're structure is obviously derived from extra limbs.

Dragons are just their own thing. Created by whatever created the world.

>Are dragons birds, or are they mammals?

Neither, they're synapsids; a genus of "primitive" mammal-like reptiles that possess the qualities and traits of both lizards and reptiles.

I suppose if we needed a "real world" contemporary relative to compare to: Dragons are more closely related to monotremes and maybe marsupials?

>Sail eventually splits off into two wings, muscles develop to manipulate them as such

It checks out

So metallic dragons were secretly the most realistic anatomy

The sail of dimetredon and other "sail back" synapsids is a rigid extension of the spine, not an articulated set of limbs with a humerus, radius, uldna, phalanges, etc.

Dragons don't fit in with earth taxonomy.

Sometimes the correct answer is none of the above.

If you really want to pedantic about this, Dragons are likely closely related to the group of mammal-like synapsids, like
Dimetrodon considering we know they live in colder climates, it stands to reason they know how to regulate their internal body temperature.

>mangafox
/a/ is looking down on you, fa/tg/uy

I like this line of thought

Six limbs isn't possible for any kind of vertebrate as we know them.

Unless a six limbed Permian fish akin to Tiktaalik evolved covergently to it, which isn't that outlandish

I find your strict compartmentalizing of dragons incredibly boring.

The Cockatrice and the Basalisk are a paired animal and are considered dragons. Not True Dragons, but still dragons.

Which is ironic considering we found an actual "Cockatrice" in the fossil record

They're inorganic creatures spawned by elemental storms you fucking idiot

If by
>there own kingdom
You mean
>spawns of satan
Then you are correct.

>Dragons are more closely related to monotremes and maybe marsupials?
Very good.
You could get away with scales, fur, spikes, poison barbs, egg laying, milk production, it even gives a good excuse for the weird Monster Hunter furred wyverns and Elder Dragons

In A Song of Ice and Fire it is never pointed out clearly, but when the dragons hatched from their eggs on the pyre with Daenerys, two of them were attached to her breasts, as if she was breastfeeding them, while the third one waited. So the dragons from that setting might be able to produce/consume milk.
Might be that they are monotremes as this user pointed out

Yes.

...

...

I really like this body plan over the typical style.

Oh man, that's really close to what I had imagined for a more realistic dragon. Maybe the arms'd be a little bigger so they could support weight, but that's pretty damn good.

Gore Magala, Shagaru Magala and Gogmazios do share this wing-arm-leg style

youtube.com/watch?v=wgYPYJhmVV0

I remember a fake-umentary series broadcast on Animal Planet when I was a kid. Pic related was in the first installment, living in the Cretaceous period. This had made me think that evolution from a prototype like this could've been possible for dragons.
Still, your idea is pretty damn creative. It accounts for Gigginoxes from the Monster Hunter franchise, at the very least.

Ma paleontologist nigga

>Mangafox

>Serpens lactus

Mammal like reptiles

Are they chordates? I feel like you could sell me on an arthropod model.

kind of my thinking

here

The platypus is electrosensitive, right? That explains dragons hoarding precious metals right there. It's not out of greed or malice, it's just a very soothing, uniform electromagnetic field because they're such good conductors. It's dragon ASMR.

Webbed forelimbs could easily evolve into wings over enough time as well.

Dragons are chimeric monsters with elements and aspects of multiple animals. They have wings, horns, manes, whiskers, fur, scales, horns/antlers, claws/talons, ears, ridges, fins, spines...

...

No. Many organisms have found ways to flatten their ribs (some for gliding, some for fitting under small gaps, some for display, etc). Over time, dragons just evolved to the point where their wings were more developed than mere gliding ribs.

This is almost as gay as dragon-girls. Almost.

Dragons = seraphim. They are ANGLES.

If you didn't know this beforehand KILL YOURSELF