If dragons were real, how would they fly and breathe fire?
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From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Joy Dolo. So I host a history podcast for kids called Forever Ago because I love learning about how people lived in the past. The other night I was thinking about how people entertained themselves centuries ago.

Before TV or radio or audiobooks, people told each other stories. Stories about faraway lands, adventures, romances, and fantastical beasts like dragons. Obviously, dragons are the coolest mythical beast because they're magic and they can fly and breathe fire. I wish I could see a dragon in real life from a distance with a fire extinguisher. You know what I mean?

I mean, I know dragons aren't real, but if they did exist, would they be able to fly and breathe fire like the dragons in stories? Are there real life animals who can do stuff like that? Sophia was wondering this too. My name is Sophia. I'm from Lexington, Kentucky. And if dragons were real, how would they fly around and breathe fire? I'm Professor Mark Lorch. I work at the University of Hull in the UK.

So how do dragons fly and how do they breathe fire? Well, that's a fabulous question. And you could come up with all sorts of magical answers, but I'm going to try and focus on some biologically plausible answers. So I'm going to look at what other animals do and see whether we can...

you know use some of the things that they do and apply them to dragons well firstly the flying thing i suppose the nearest thing to a dragon would be the pterosaurs back you know 70 million years ago that flew around and glided around the earth at the same time as the dinosaurs lived so some of these were absolutely huge so the largest um pterosaur

was about the size of a giraffe. They were quite skinny, you know, they weren't as big and as bulky as a dragon, but, you know, given that their wingspan would have been about the same as seven or eight adults sort of standing with their arms stretched out together, I'd say that counts as a flying dragon.

The trickier thing then is to explain how they might breathe fire. So if we're going to think about fire, what do we need for fire? Well, we need three things. Fuel, gas.

and an ignition source, something to start it. So let's start with the fuel. Well, things like methane. So cows produce a lot of methane. Yeah, they burp it and it comes out the other end as well. And that's very flammable. Other things that biological systems produce that's flammable is alcohol. Yeah, so yeast produce that and actually it's produced potentially by some fish and so on as well. The problem there though is that...

alcohol just passes through all our biological tissue really, really quickly. I reckon the most likely source, though, is something oily. You know, they eat a lot of animals. Animals have fats and oils in them. So I think it could store some of these fats and oils. And it's a bit like there's a type of bird, a former gull, that actually vomits up oily yuck to deter animals.

predators and so on and maybe dragons produce something similar what if we add a bit of extra

extra oxygen into this mix. That would make something burn really, really well. The next thing we need is something to light it with. Well, we could do that all sorts of ways. Maybe they eat stones that create sparks. Or possibly they have something like an electric eel that generates a spark that might ignite all of that oil and allow them to vomit flaming oil all over their prey. So there you go. That's my answer to how do dragons breathe fire

They set fire to oily vomit. Well, that's the coolest, grossest thing I've ever heard. A dragon could probably fly if its wings were big enough, like the wings on the extinct giraffe-sized pterodactyl. It would probably have to have light, hollow bones like birds do. Otherwise, it'd be too heavy to get off the ground.

The fire-breathing part is trickier. A dragon would have to be able to make some kind of flammable fuel in its body. It would have to be able to mix that fuel with oxygen and then make some kind of spark to get the fire going. There isn't a real-life animal that breathes fire that way, but there are different animals on Earth that come up with that.

Now that would be an awesome imaginary creature. A ginormous beetle spewing fire from its butt. Where's that fairytale adventure? ♪

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Thank you.

The executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks this week go to Kylie Kennedy and Mark Lorch. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then...

Oh no! The giant beetle butt monster is coming! Save us, Wizard Joy! Fear not, good sir. I shall vanquish it. Taste my abracadabra, you beetle butt fiend!