When Gygax adopted the term for D&D, he made wyverns somewhat weaker than true dragons, and unable to breathe fire. Traditional illustrations often show two-legged dragons with snake-like tails ending in a sharp point, and this became the poison stinger seen in D&D. Perhaps following on from this, there has been a tendency in fantasy fiction to make wyverns weaker than four-legged dragons, although that's perhaps turning round again more recently - in both the books and TV series, for instance, the fire-breathing and deadly dragons of Game of Thrones only have two legs.
1E
The wyvern of 1E is a long, somewhat slender animal with a sinuous tail ending in a scorpion-like stinger. The feet have at least three long and clawed toes and the legs are probably digitigrade, although it's hard to tell for sure. The head has a long snout over a rather shorter jaw, somewhere between that of a shark and crocodile in shape and has horns. The purpose of these horns is unclear, as it doesn't attack with them; they might perhaps be used in contests between members of the species (for mates, say) in situations where the stinger and powerful jaws might leads to too much risk of serious injury.
The wings are somewhat curious, with the membrane being supported by five digits splayed out in a fan, and one, perhaps two, additional claw-like digits projecting upwards from the 'hand'. There is no indication of an elbow in the arm, and no propatagium (the part of the wing membrane forward of the arm bones in a bat or pterosaur wing).
In many respects, the wyvern is barely less dangerous than the dragon. It is as hard to injure as a man in steel plate armour, although much of that may well be due to agility rather than thick scales. It can sustain as much damage as a hippopotamus... which is actually more than the smallest species of true dragon can in this edition. Its bite is also about as effective as that of the smallest dragons although, unlike them, it doesn't attack with its claws. It is, however, less intelligent, being about the same as a gorilla, and, while its sting is deadly, it lacks the area effect or range of a dragon's breath and this is really the thing that makes it less dangerous overall.
2E
The detailed anatomy of the wyvern changes in 2E, although, as is usual in this edition, the statistics don't. The body has a similar shape to before, being relatively slender - when medieval artists drew two-legged dragons, they tended to make them snakes with hind legs and wings, so this fits with the original idea. The legs are more obviously bird-like with, to use the technical terms, both a tarsometatarsus and an anisodactyl foot.
Other changes include a row of dorsal spines, presumably arising from the vertebrae, and a more beaklike jaw that lacks the overhanging snout. The horns look less functional than before, curving backwards in a way that makes it hard to see how they could be employed even in non-lethal combat. The wings, however, look significantly less odd, with four digits instead of six or seven. Three support the main wing membrane as the four fingers of bats do (as often in such illustrations, it seems to be the index finger that's missing), while the thumb has a grasping claw and a small triangular part of the wing membrane. This might function as the thumb does in birds, acting like the slats on an aeroplane wing and helping with manoeuvrability. There is an elbow, but still no propatagium.
Wyverns are solitary, or at best live in small family groups, implying some degree of parental care like that of birds - or crocodiles. As in 1E, they are said to be 'evil', although it's unclear what that would mean in practice since they don't seem to be truly sentient.
3E
The 3E wyvern is covered in projecting horny scales, similar to those of the real-world thorny devil (a kind of lizard). The beak is more pronounced, with a sharp point resembling that of an eagle, and the neck is much shorter and more robust. Although the legs still have a broadly bird-like structure, the rear toe looks to be absent, leaving it with only the three. The horns have gone, although it can now use its claws to attack as well as its teeth, and it has external ears with wing-like membranes stretching beneath them - something quite unlike any real-world reptile.
Wyverns are much smaller than before, being less than half the length stated in earlier editions, even including the tail. Nonetheless, they have roughly the same hit points. They're not especially agile, as the more sinuous 1E version might have been, and their scales really do seem as tough as plate armour. (Although this is likely because they are thick, not because they're made of something literally as hard as steel).
Because they're folded, it's harder to make out the wing structure, but they're clearer in the 4E illustration, which shows what otherwise looks like a very similar animal. This has three digits supporting the wing membrane, as in 2E, but the 'thumb' is free and projects forward, ending in a large claw. It's harder to see what the purpose of this would be, since it surely doesn't need it to climb as bats do with theirs, and the claws on the ends of the other digits look even less useful. There's still no propatagium.
In other changes, wyverns are no longer described as evil, but they are just about able to speak and so must be sentient. They are now as intelligent as an ogre - and much more so than a gorilla, which is no longer that different from most other animals.
5E
The wyvern here is somewhere between the squat short-necked form of 3E and the slender long-necked one of 1E, and the spiky scales have gone in favour of smoother skin. There is no longer a beak, with the jaws now being triangular and lined with very reptile-like teeth. Both the horns and the dorsal spines are also back, with the horns looking as useless as ever - perhaps they are a sexual signal of some kind?
The legs are digitigrade, but no longer bird-like. The creature has four toes, although the hallux ('big toe') is almost vestigial. The thumb seems more flexible than before, although its function remains unclear; unlike the hallux, it looks too big to be vestigial. The creature in the picture seems to have undergone some sort of injury to its wings, and not the sort one would likely see on, say, a bat. And, behold; there is a propatagium, albeit a very small one that can't be useful for much.
The 5E wyvern is also back to being bestial again, and, while more intelligent than most animals, is now less so than a gorilla. As is common in this edition, the hit points have gone way up, to the extent that it now has far more than an elephant, but the armour is merely tough leathery hide. Altogether, even ignoring the lack of a breath weapon, wyverns are by now significantly less physically powerful than dragons.
Unless you count the stinger, wyverns do not have any unusual or specific attack, and there's nothing unusual about their anatomy or biology that wouldn't also apply to dragons. So this is as good a time as any to look at dragons in general. 3E introduced the concept of categorising creatures as "humanoids", "aberrations", and so on. Significantly, dragons, including wyverns, are their own category of creature, distinct from mere magical beasts or monstrosities.
While it's hard to identify exactly what this might be, we can at least say that dragons are a specific type of creature, with a number of features in common. And whatever that is is equally true of bestial wyverns as it is of fully sentient true dragons. We can start by asking what exactly a dragon is.
The first obvious answer is probably that they're reptilian. But, in fact, the Draconomicon, among other sources, says that they aren't really reptiles at all, but, instead, are "synapsids". This is a general term that applies to all mammals, and to all creatures that are more closely related to mammals than they are to reptiles. So you're a synapsid, and so is your dog.
But, since we can reasonably assume that dragons are not themselves mammals, this is clearly intended as shorthand for "non-mammalian synapsid". In the real world, all such creatures are long extinct, with the very last of them (probably) dying out at around the same time as the dinosaurs. The modern classification system for such animals is rather complicated, but for much of the 20th century synapsids were grouped into one of two kinds.
Therapsids were synapsids that were particularly mammal-like, and which include the immediate ancestors of mammals. Pelycosaurs were those that were less closely related to mammals, and, presumably, included the ancestors of the therapsids. Since we're mostly going on fossilised bones, it's hard to be too confident what the skin of these animals looked like, but there is good evidence that at least some therapsids were furred, while at least some pelycosaurs had reptile-like scales. So, on those grounds, dragons are probably closer to the latter, although clearly more advanced than the real sort, which died out before dinosaurs even got started.
The most likely grounds for describing dragons as synapsids is that they're supposed to be warm-blooded. Pelycosaurs probably weren't, which is why they didn't need insulating fur but, as I say, dragons are clearly more advanced than they are. And, like elephants, rhinos, and hippos, they wouldn't need much, if any fur, because they are so large that they'd lose heat rather slowly anyway. Admittedly, the wings are thin enough that they might lose body heat, but pterosaurs were furry, and so probably warm-blooded, and large wings evidently weren't a problem for them. And this is even assuming that dragons don't have some sort of magical furnace inside them, which is possible, especially for the fire-breathing sort.
A less obvious feature that dragons share with synapsids is that their legs are vertically placed under their bodies, rather than sprawled out to the side as they are in lizards, crocodiles, and the like. Mind you, this was true of many dinosaurs as well, and those really are reptiles, so it's not definitive.
Still, we can assume, that, for the most part, the internal anatomy of dragons more closely resembles that of mammals than it does the reptilian form. Having said which, though, this isn't hugely significant, since reptiles have most of the same soft organs as mammals do - lungs, kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, and so on. The differences tend to be finer than this, such as the exact structure of the heart, the shape of the rib cage, and the nature of the muscular diaphragm between the chest and abdomen (this latter is really a mammalian thing, although some reptiles do have something that looks a bit similar).
The brain is also likely to be mammalian in structure, which makes it easier to justify the high intelligence of true dragons. On the other hand, the existence of lizard men indicates that this isn't a showstopper in the D&D universe while, in the real world, birds lack many of the unique mammalian brain structures and are still pretty bright.
One area in which the anatomy of reptiles does differ from that of most mammals, however, is the reproductive tract. While not all reptiles lay eggs (sea snakes don't, for instance) most do, and this is a trait we know to be shared with dragons. However, the existence of the platypus makes it seem very likely that both therapsids and pelycosaurs laid eggs, with live birth having developed some time after the monotreme ancestor split from the other mammals. So it wouldn't be so strange for draconic genitalia to resemble that of animals such as the echidna.
Although probably without the rotating four-headed penis.
There is no real way of guessing how long a dragon egg would take to hatch based on real-world analogies. It is true that, on average, the bigger the bird or reptile, the longer it takes to incubate their eggs, but there are so many exceptions to this that we can't project this trend to larger, mythical, creatures in any meaningful way. For instance, the ostrich is the world's largest living bird, but it isn't even especially close to having the longest incubation period - in fact, it's only about twice that of a chicken.
Still, the longest incubation period in real-world animals is somewhere around 3 months, for albatrosses and crocodiles, and it seems unlikely that dragons would be any less than that. For all we know, given the human-level intelligence of some of them, they might take as long to incubate their eggs as humans spend pregnant.
The habit among mammals of feeding their young with milk likely arose long before live birth did, which we know in this case because platypuses and echidnas do produce milk. There's no real way to know whether therapsids did the same (when you only have bones to look at, the dividing line between mammals and almost-mammals can't be whether or not they produce milk, and is often based on features of the jaw and ear bones instead) but even if some of them did, pelycosaurs probably didn't, and dragons surely don't.
The social structure of dragons - wyverns included - nonetheless implies protracted parental care of the young, something that's not typically seen in lizards or turtles. Still, crocodiles do show a surprising degree of parental care, protecting their young for the first few months of life and responding to their cries when they are distressed. While it's less obviously true in the case of wyverns, baby dragons seem pretty dangerous from the get-go and may need rather less attention. But somebody has to teach them how to speak Draconic...
No comments:
Post a Comment