The fact that creatures that look like dragons previously lived on Earth is beyond doubt. They are grouped together under the general name "dinosaurs", although the differences within dinosaurs are very great.
Modern biologists divide dinosaurs into two orders according to the structure of the pelvic bones: ornithischian and sauropods (sauropods). They are divided into herbivores and predators, flying, running and crawling. In total, there are now more than one and a half thousand species. Could those who would be appropriately called fire-breathing dragons be lost among such a variety?
Let's try to answer this question.
If we suspect that some dinosaurs breathed fire, then it would be a good idea to initially divide this suspicion into two: 1) they breathed something combustible and 2) there was a possibility of igniting this fuel. Let's take them in order.
Dino exhalation
Dinosaurs were divided into carnivores and herbivores. What the last dinosaurs ate cannot be determined exactly. The remains of the contents of their stomachs have not yet been found. Therefore, researchers draw conclusions according to two circumstances: what then grew around them and what, in principle, their jaws could chew. Of the vegetation, ferns, araucaria and conifers could be especially attractive to dinosaurs, according to scientists.
But the shape of the jaws and teeth definitely indicates that dinosaurs could not chew this food, they swallowed it unchewed. Dinosaurs sometimes swallowed stones to digest food, just as modern chickens sometimes swallow stones to grind food in their stomachs. But the main process of digestion was provided by microorganisms that lived in their stomachs and intestines.
These microorganisms not only made food digestible, but also produced methane. The methane cycle of digestion has become widespread due to climate change.
Dinosaurs appeared when the level of oxygen reached its lowest level in the history of the globe, about ten percent. The reaction of living organisms was not limited to changes in body morphology, the appearance of bipedal animals with improved capabilities.
The food cycle has changed. It was impossible to count on the fact that the oxidation of the food consumed would be due to oxygen. At the same time, the air temperature rose, creating favorable conditions for the activity of microorganisms.
In the Triassic period (250-200 million years ago), at the beginning of their evolution, dinosaurs weighed an average of just over a ton. In the Jurassic period (200–145 million years ago), when dinosaurs were at their most widespread, their average weight over 55 million years, it increased first to 2.5 tons, and then to 15 tons. And in some species it was even larger, in diplodocus, say, about 20 tons. In the Cretaceous period (145-60 million years ago), as the proportion of oxygen in the air increased even more rapidly, the average dinosaur weight again decreased to 5 tons.
Methane is known as a greenhouse gas that absorbs solar radiation and causes temperatures to rise. This gas is considered the main pollutant of the atmosphere, not only in ancient times, but also now. Methane emissions from farm animals and, above all, from cattle, currently contribute a significant proportion of the methane in the air.
It is characteristic that in all dinosaurs the nasal openings are located at the highest point of the head. On this basis, it was long believed that herbivorous dinosaurs fed on algae, and their nostrils protruded from the water, like modern crocodiles. Dinosaurs came to land only to lay their eggs. But now it has been proven for sure that these dinosaurs got their food on land.
They proved it, but somehow forgot to explain why their nostrils are on top. And the only remaining explanation for this is the safety of exhaling a flammable gas.
A group of scientists from three British universities (Liverpool, London and the University of Glasgow) published the results of research in the journal Current Biology regarding the same atmospheric pollution that the Earth owed to dinosaurs in ancient times.
They compared the then methane pollution with the current one and it turned out that if now cows annually emit into the atmosphere (according to various estimates) from 50 to 100 million tons of methane, then dinosaurs could emit at least 520 million tons. And we are talking only about sauropod dinosaurs, sauropods.
And now methane emissions from all sources, including swamps and industry, are approaching this figure.
In 2008, the FAO, an organization within the United Nations, released a 400-page report stating that one and a half billion cows are responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gases, which is more than air pollution from all modes of transport.
In fact, if cows emit almost pure methane, then dinosaurs excreted more like biogas, in which methane made up about half the volume, and the rest was carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and even 2-3% hydrogen sulfide, also fuel.
An adult diplodocus weighing about 20 tons had to eat up to 300 kg of foliage daily to maintain life. If we focus on the performance of modern biogas plants, then about 70 cubic meters of biogas were obtained from a daily portion of diplodocus, which contained 20–30 cubic meters of methane. Diplodocus, of course, could not keep such a volume inside itself.
Brontosaurus (apatosaurus), the main subject of research on dinosaur digestion So, the dinosaurs had something that could ignite. But how could this methane be ignited? There are two options for igniting the methane that dinosaurs exhaled (Brontosaurus, at least): external and internal. Either the external environment determined the ignition of the methane, or it was possible for the dinosaur itself to ignite the exhaled methane.
Ignition from outside
According to the results of many studies, the air temperature in the Mesozoic era was about 10 degrees higher than at present. It is known that the higher the temperature, the higher the ionization of air.
In particular, food tropical plants largely comes from the nitrogen contained in the ionized (pre-thunderstorm) air of the tropics. Dinosaurs, which appeared during the period of the lowest proportion of oxygen in the air, evolved in parallel with the increase in this proportion.
The higher the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere, the higher the ionization and the likelihood of electrical discharges that appear independently of living beings. We all know lightning, loud thunder discharges. But much more often in a more ionized atmosphere, quiet discharges occur.
The most famous and studied is the so-called corona discharge. It is seen on the tops of trees, and if we talk about modernity, then on poles and masts.
The long neck of a diplodocus or brontosaurus (apatosaurus) provided an increased likelihood of a corona discharge at the level of their exhalation if it raised its head high. A quiet discharge is accompanied by a low crackle, not thunder. Therefore, for an observer, the ignition of a methane (biogas) cloud would look like the exhalation of fire.
Quiet atmospheric discharge appears at critical tension electric field in the atmosphere. For modern atmospheric pressure and a temperature of 20 ° C, it should be quite high - 15 kilovolts per centimeter.
But in the time of the dinosaurs, both temperature and pressure were different. Moreover, these discharges occur at a very high frequency, on average 10 kilohertz, but the frequency, which increases the probability of breakdown, reaches 30 megahertz. At this frequency, the surfaces are actually heated as in a conventional microwave.
Ignition from within
It was not necessary to guess that electrical processes were going on inside animals. The first one to get electrocuted by an electric stingray told everyone about it.
This practical knowledge entered science at the end of the 18th century. In 1786 professor at the University of Bologna Luigi Galvani(1737–1798) showed that if a wire is brought to the leg of a headless frog and an electrostatic machine is turned, the leg will twitch. This effect was known long before him, the first such experiments were carried out a century earlier.
It is believed that Galvani did not know about them, and, as often happens in history, this ignorance has benefited science. Unlike previous researchers, he concluded that " electricity is inside the animal". And this guess turned out to be brilliant.
Why, for the sake of science, was it necessary to first deprive the frog of its head? In order to eliminate the influence brain activity so that the phenomenon under study concerns only the tissue, and not the organism as a whole.
But what was the reason for the interest in the tissue, and not in the body? In those days, electricity was considered a fluid, a liquid not only colorless and odorless, but also weightless. L. Galvani was convinced that the brain produces some electrical fluid, which is distributed throughout the body and delivered to the muscles through nervous system. Therefore, it was necessary to detect the presence of this fluid in the tissues, regardless of the brain. By the way, everyone has already forgotten about the fluid, but the electrohydraulic analogy has remained to this day.
“Animal” electricity was then opposed to “metallic” electricity, to that which is obtained from a set of pairs of metals and is known modern man not just for batteries.
great physicist Alessandro Volta(1745-1827) denied the very idea of animal electricity, but as a real scientist he wanted to make sure that he was denying correctly. That is why for 8 years he continued to dissect eels and stingrays, to explore "animal electricity".
Moreover, it was this study of the structure of the electric organs of fish that allowed him to create the first device, which, ironically, was named after his opponent - a galvanic battery.
14 years before Galvani's experiments, sir John Walsh, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the British Parliament, made a special visit to French fishermen who were dealing with electric rays.
He asked them only one question, before which he asked them to touch the contacts of the electrostatic machine. The question was British laconic: "Looks like?". The answers were unanimous: "Yes."
Another would have calmed down on this, but John Walsh needed public recognition, and he turned to Sir Henry Cavendish(1731–1810), a great physicist. He created a physical model that mimics electrical system stingray. And a new science, electrophysiology, began.
Great electrophysiologists
On the way to answering the question of whether fire-breathing dragons could live on Earth, we will meet many wonderful people. Let's take a look at at least three of them.
The first - (1811-1868), an outstanding Italian physiologist. He showed that when a muscle is cut, it always goes electricity, which flows from its intact surface to the cross section.
The research of K. Matteuci was continued by the French scientist (1818–1896), who first proved that when a muscle is excited (stimulated) by an electric discharge, tissue ionization occurs and a potential difference appears between the excited and unexcited cells (tissues) of the muscle.
The ion theory of excitation appeared, which for some time existed at a qualitative level. The so-called Dubois-Reymond rule : « the irritating effect of the current is possible only at the moment of closing and opening the circuit».
And, finally, an outstanding Ukrainian physiologist (1873-1941). In 1896, he was the first to quantitatively prove the dependence of the electrical potential of a muscle on the intensity of the appearance of ionized chemical compounds. The riddle of animal electricity was revealed to them.
V.Yu. Chagovets proposed to consider electric potentials as diffusion ones, associated with an uneven distribution of ions inside a living tissue. The diffusion theory of the origin of electrical potentials that he developed was based on the original idea: if a muscle is excited, then the metabolism in its excited area increases dramatically. And, consequently, the electrical activity also increases.
(1811–1862)
(1818–1896)
(1873–1941)
Ten years later, his theory was supplemented by the discovery of electrical and chemical processes on cell walls. It was found that potassium cations easily pass through the cell walls, and worse - sodium ions, and even worse - anions of potassium and its compounds.
The ionization of the cell wall occurs, on one side of which a positive, and on the other side, a negative electrical potential accumulates. A microcapacitor is formed from the cell wall (membrane). And the walls of many cells can make a powerful capacitor.
Muscle electrochemistry
But electrophysiology is not limited to the capacitor effect. To explain another effect, let's start with simple electrochemistry.
Electric potentials in solutions are divided into two types: electronic and ionic. In the first, the potential arises from the exchange of free electrons, which are given off by some metals and captured by others. If a galvanic cell consists of a copper-zinc pair, then copper dissolved in acid gives off electrons, and zinc accepts them.
The ionic type potential arises, according to the results of the studies of the three great electrophysiologists mentioned, due to three processes: diffusion, membrane and interfacial.
Each time one of these processes is decisive for the appearance of the electric potential. An example of a diffusion process: we take the same metal solution (electrolyte, for example, hydrochloric acid), divide it into two parts with different concentrations. The electric potential between them appears due to the fact that the rate of diffusion of positively and negatively charged ions (cations and anions) goes differently at different electrolyte concentrations. A weak solution will have a negative potential, a more concentrated solution will have a positive one.
Approximately the same phenomenon occurs in the muscles, when the excited part of the muscle has a negative potential relative to the unexcited one.
It has long been known that when the position of the human body changes, static charges arise. There are approximately 10 trillion cells in the human body. various types. A potential of -70 to -80 millivolts can appear on the walls of each cell.
In the muscles of mammals (of course, and of humans too), the electrical potentials of individual cells cancel each other out. In the electrical organs of fish, they are combined, allowing individual electrocytes with a voltage of tens of millivolts to form a battery that gives hundreds of volts, like in the South American electric eel.
In this species of freshwater fish, the organs that produce the electrical discharge consist of 70 cell lines that increase the discharge. There are 6,000 such cells in each line. As a result of the summation of the electrical potential along these lines, the final voltage increases to 500 volts.
And this is not the most outstanding creation of nature. In marine fish, the number of lines is in the range from 500 to 1000, and the number of electrocytes in a line is about a thousand. Such a system of cells gives an impulse with a power of 1 kilowatt at the peak.
Such a description of the electrical processes that take place in the organisms of fish that are exotic to us could be continued, to tell, for example, about the form of such kilovoltage impulses or about the role that nerve cells play in their formation. But that would distract us from answering the question: So were fire-breathing dragons still possible in ancient times? ».
Therefore, we will only mention that in order to obtain a spark in an internal combustion engine, it is necessary to ensure that the voltage at the contacts car candle was about 10 kilovolts. But if an eel weighing 4 kg is capable of generating a pulse of 500 volts, then what could be expected from a dinosaur weighing three and a half thousand times more?
In 1907 a German professor Hans Pieper(1877-1915) invented electromyography , a method of recording bioelectric potentials arising in the muscles of animals and humans during excitation of muscle fibers. The study of electrical phenomena in the heart is now actively used in cardiology.
So, already at the beginning of the twentieth century, it became generally recognized that electrical processes take place in any living organism, and not only in electric rays or salamander.
But was the electrical potential of the dinosaur muscles enough to collect an electrical potential of several tens of kilovolts? To do this, you need to understand how the size of dinosaurs changed over time and highlight the period when this possibility was maximum. After all, the more muscles, the stronger the discharge can be formed.
So dinosaurs in the middle and late Jurassic period could well have generated electrical potentials in their muscles sufficient to produce an igniting discharge.
Skin and bones
In addition to the electrical potentials formed in the muscles, there are also processes of the appearance of electrical potentials on the skin and bones. Let us turn again to the dinosaurs, to analogous electrical phenomena that could take place on their skin and in their bones.
First, about the skin. Rare finds of fossilized dinosaur skin have made it possible to establish that it is very similar to chicken skin. There are 6 varieties of dinosaur skin, there is even skin that is a cross between snake skin and fish scales.
The psitacosaurus, for example, known as the "parrot lizard", had a thick skin covered with keratinized tubercles and, in places, feathers, intermediate between that found in sharks, dolphins, and hippopotamuses. Although he lived already in the Cretaceous period, when "fire-breathing dragons" were already, apparently, a rarity.
The fact that the electrical potential of the skin changes with pressure on its individual areas has long been known. This effect is used in electromassage and lie detector test. In addition, dinosaurs had a very diverse perspiration, which, as the researchers found, also changed over time, and possibly with the situation. Some of them could well have the properties of electrolytes.
Physicists have long been familiar with the phenomenon piezo effect, when pressure is applied to some object (most often, it is a crystal), its bending or stretching causes the appearance of an electric potential. Biologists have also noted this phenomenon, but so far it is not included in the main line of research.
The piezoelectric effect is reversible. That is, an electric charge introduced into a crystal bends its surface. Moreover, it is reversible many times: the called electric charge the curvature redistributes the charge both over the surface to which the charge is applied, and over the opposite surface of the crystal, which is also bent.
There are many devices that use solid piezocrystals. For example, echo sounders, in which crystals, under the influence of electrical discharges, generate ultrasound and pick up the reflected signal, for example, from the bottom or a school of fish. Piezo effects exist in any living organism at several levels: skin, muscles and bones.
It is recognized that the piezoelectric properties of bone tissue are not specific properties of fish or amphibians, they exist in all vertebrates.
The generation of electrical potential occurs when the bones are loaded during walking or exercise. After scientists established that dinosaurs did not eat in water, but on land, it was necessary to explain why herbivorous dinosaurs had long necks.
Here, naturally, another analogy spread - no longer with a crocodile, but with a giraffe. However, studies have shown that their main food grew at a height of up to one and a half meters. For this, the dinosaurs did not need a long neck. It was also established: in order to get high-growing tree branches, dinosaurs sometimes had to stand on their hind limbs. Why do this if you have a long neck?
Why was such a long neck necessary? There can be two explanations. The first has already been mentioned - in order to catch the point of a more likely ignition of the exhaled gas at a higher altitude. But there is also a second one. The bones (and possibly the skin) of the neck formed an electrical potential sufficient to ignite the exhaled gas.
Here the known is combined with another known, and a common understanding of what happened in ancient times is obtained.
If there is no regular load on the bone tissue, then the bones seem to dissolve, osteoporosis begins. This is well known, but is not realized either by a simple clerk in a sedentary job, or by a scientist who does not think about why this is so. Most likely, precisely because electrical processes stop in the bones at rest and calcium is washed out from the bones of a living organism. And in a dead bone, these reactions also stop.
At different types fish, the muscles that form the electrical discharge are located in different parts body. So, in some electric rays they are in the tail, in others - in the head area.
If we draw an analogy with a fire-breathing dinosaur, then in one case the ignition of the emitted methane occurs after a wave of the tail, in the other - by the movement of the long neck.
In the so-called elephant fish (Mormyroidei), these muscles are located both along the front third of the body and at the tip of the tail, depending on the specific subspecies of these fish and their age. So it is possible that in young dinosaurs the electrical organ was located in the neck, while in adults it was in the tail.
In electric catfish, an electric discharge is generated between the pectoral fins, but in some small electric catfish, between the dorsal fin and the swim bladder. In a spinoper fish that lives in South America, the electrical potential is formed by an organ that extends from the tip of the tail to the pectoral fins.
An electric eel has three organs that produce an electrical discharge: the main and two auxiliary ones. And he, depending on the situation, uses them in any combination. In stargazer fish, part of the eye muscles has been transformed into an electrical organ. With this option, the dinosaur could set fire to the exhaled methane at any time when it sees danger. In fish, the electrical potential is usually between the more and less ionized parts of the muscles, which are located one above the other. This is called a vertical dipole. But sometimes there are also horizontal dipoles, when these parts of the muscles are located on the right and left. How they were located in dinosaurs, one can only guess.
Two disclaimers in conclusion
The hypothesis about the means of igniting the gas from the inside has one more aspect. Even among paleontologists, there are doubts that the study of the dinosaur skeleton can lead to accurate conclusions regarding the structure and functions. internal organs. And if this task is already difficult, one can hardly hope that tomorrow electric organs will be found on what were once a single skeleton, but now scattered bones dug out of the ground.
And one more plot. The most daring archaeologists attribute the appearance of ancient people to the time of 23 million years ago, and the Cretaceous period ended, as we know, 60 million years ago. Unless we deal with this gap of 37 million years, we will never be able to explain how the fire-breathing dragon legends came about.
I will not take the liberty of explaining how this became possible. But the claim that they were possible seems to be proven.
Wilkinson D. M., Nisbet E. G., Ruxton G. D. Could methane by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warming?? – Current Biology. - 2012. - Vol. 22, Iss. 9.–P. R292–R293.
Khramov Yu. A. Matteucci Carlo // Physicists: A Biographical Directory / Ed. A. I. Akhiezer. – Ed. 2nd, rev. and additional - M.: Nauka, 1983. - S. 181
Yu.P. Ravens, candidate of economic sciences, member of the editorial board of the journal "ECO"
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Distant relatives of the Serpent Gorynych
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Wonderful fantasy worlds
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Description of the flash game
Fire-breathing dragon
Dragon Dish
The game is similar to Zombies vs Plants.
Move to the right path to spit fire at the advancing opponents.
Upgrade your dragon for better protection.
Feel like a ferocious fire-breathing dragon languishing over gold! Protect the cave with your untold riches!
That's just in the role of a huge scary reptile in this flash game you will play for the cutest green dragon. And instead of treasures, there are cookies and sweets. Many daredevils will encroach on dragon lollipops and lozenges, do not let any of them steal the candy shamelessly!
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A free toy in which funny 2D characters, unobtrusive medieval music and a nice kind atmosphere are waiting for you.
