Beast Legends (2010) s01e02 Episode Script
Fire Dragon
In this episode of Beast Legends: the hunt is on for a deadly dragon.
Start with a 500-year-old story.
This is a dragon! Add mysterious footprints.
People have been finding these footprints all over the place.
A slice of swamp monster.
Wait Don't put your hand down.
Whoa! One cup of cave creature.
Stir in fear from a forest.
Shh! Shh! And flambé.
Whoa! Stories of terrifying monsters are told the world over.
Some are myths but others are believed to be real.
Now a team of investigators will track down clues and find evidence for the beast behind the legend.
The quest, to build the creature, bring it to life and unleash it on the modern world.
Steve and Francis are in southern Poland, on the trail of a fire-breathing beast.
The rest of the team are in the Beast Lab, searching for the origins of the legend.
So, dragons, possibly the best beast legend of them all.
Really widespread around the world, but some of the best ones are in Europe, and there's a particular one in Poland that I think will be really great to follow up on: Smok the Dragon.
So, let's just check out the legend.
A Polish kingdom is terrorized by a deadly dragon named Smok.
It scorches fields and devours herds.
Only the sacrifice of virgins appeases it.
The king decrees that he who slays the beast shall inherit the throne.
Many warriors try to pierce the dragon's scales but fail.
Then a humble shoemaker takes up the challenge.
He stuffs a sheep with molten sulfur and tempts the dragon from its lair.
To douse the burning pain, the dragon, Smok, drinks half a river and finally meets its end.
You know, with these things, I always just think, "What incentive to lose your virginity.
" You can't be fed to a dragon.
This story has inspired the team to imagine what this beast might be, and to bring it to virtual life.
We've got wonderful images here of dragons from all over the world.
British dragons, the Asian ones as well.
What most of them tend to have in common is: wings and breathing fire.
Fire is absolutely unprecedented in the animal world, as far as I'm aware.
I've never heard of any animal, terrestrial or aquatic, using fire.
This is going to be a challenge.
So, a great place to start, for this one, is Wawel Castle, which is in Krakow.
There are, allegedly, dragon bones.
So, where Steve and Francis got to go is right here.
Francis and I are here in Krakow, Poland, to find the famous Smok Dragon bones at Wawel Castle.
Could you translate this plaque here? Yeah.
It says that the Polish Prince, called Krakus, in 730, over here, he killed the dragon, and he founded the castle over here.
It's not that dissimilar to my house.
To your house? It's name is Wawel Castle, and it's absolutely massive.
Bit tatty compared to my courtyard.
This is definitely Dragon Central.
Look, there's little dragons there as well, just on the edge of those little decorations.
We've got pretty rare access to these bones.
Oh, there we go.
That's them there.
These are the dragon bones.
For centuries, the bones of a dragon named Smok have hung on this cathedral wall, or so they say.
It's kind of weird, though, how there's just these bones, hanging in front of a cathedral entrance.
Can't really see the top.
We're going to have to get a closer look.
I believe there's a ladder somewhere.
This is a sacred place.
I think what happened is they found these bones, and they had absolutely no idea what they were, but they brought them here, because this is a sacred place.
They thought these were really unusual bones.
They couldn't think what animal it came from, so they assumed they were dragon's.
If we take some measurements, and then you sort of draw me a dragon with those sorts of dimensions, this could help us with a sense of scale.
These are supposed to be the dragon's rib bones, skull and femur.
But the only way to know for sure is to get up close and have a look.
I think we're going to run out of tape, though.
That's the only problem.
2'10" to the chain.
I know what that is.
This big, long bone here isn't even a rib.
That's a jaw bone from a whale, undoubtedly.
This is a jawbone? Of a whale.
I just want to have a quick, closer look at this skull.
I could see how you could think that that head is a dragon head.
These aren't from the same animal at all.
It's really the skull of a rhino.
That could even be a woolly rhino, so a really old, sort of ice-age creature.
There's only two creatures that have got a thigh bone that big, and that's probably an elephant or a mammoth.
Back then, they thought this was a real-deal dragon, right? What we should do is, the dragon we're going to create, create it from what they thought it looked like.
We can create the dragon that was in their mind, and in their story.
Time to find a nice and dry place and pull out the ink.
Yeah, the skull was very, very, sort of yeah.
A rhino skull really does suit it, actually.
So, if that's 75 cm, and the ribs are 3.
7, so they'll be five times as long as the head.
So that's one, two, three, four almost off the page, dude.
Look at this thing! No, higher! Higher! It's the full length Our dragon's going to look like this.
Do you see that? That's perfect.
Maybe this is full of helium.
It's a blimp.
So, the leg's like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Look at this thing! Yeah, that's brilliant.
Looks like an overweight dragon.
It's a blimp, isn't it? Imagine this thing moving, like this.
He can't reach the ground! Which direction does it go? It just rolls.
All right, so I'm going to make what Francis drew.
All right.
That's it.
I'm finding this dragon is not sufficiently fearsome.
This is a very inauspicious beginning.
While the Beast Lab tries to figure out what to do with the dragon's body, they've sent us to investigate another dragon clue: dragon footprints.
A lot of them just get exposed through weather, with erosion and everything else, suddenly they appear, and that's how, over the years, with humans walking through these woods, whatever, they'll come across these rocks with just a great big footprint in the middle of it.
This is cool! Phenomenal.
Absolutely phenomenal.
They're pretty huge.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
You've got a good footprint there, one there, and one there, and then one there.
So, you would expect it to be left, right, left.
And it's slightly throwing its foot in, and maybe even potentially moving direction.
So, it's going boing, boing, boing.
People have been finding these footprints all over the place around here for hundreds of years, and thinking they were dragons, or devils, or some weird creature.
And it was only in the 1950s that it was determined that they were actually dinosaur footprints.
So, how old do you think these are? These are from the early Jurassic, which is 200 million years ago.
Holy cow.
Scientists believe these tracks could belong to a little known dinosaur called kayentapus.
A top predator of it's day, it stood 7' tall, and is a close relative to T-Rex.
We're saying this is right leg.
That's right leg to right leg.
Yeah.
This is 170.
Yeah, so that's a 170 stride, a 170 cm stride, which is a big stride, really.
That's very cool.
I'd say that's very dragon-esque.
I can see exactly why they thought it was a dragon print.
I mean, it's perfect.
Well, the great thing about those feet is that they're from theropod dinosaurs.
They've got that classic three-toed morphology, and that kind of pegs them as very fast, agile predators.
This can really give us a good start towards a fleet footed and highly intelligent dragon.
You worst nightmare would be true, if a theropod were chasing after you.
It really feeds into that whole sort of bones, footprints "Here be dragons.
" I'm thinking we can start building this dragon from the ground up now.
But we've got a long way to go.
We know from the legend that our dragon was a killing machine.
So, Kathryn has sent us here to the Jagiellonian University Library to track down some 16th century manuscripts.
They might reveal some of the juicy details about our beast.
Wait till you see this one.
So, this could be a bestiary.
This will be a representation of animals they thought existed.
it's a pig-reptile.
Speculation, you know? There's a lot of unknowns back then.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's where people's imagination would run riot, and they build these animals.
They build these beasts.
There's a dragon, dragging that guy's body.
Oh, God! Yeah! She said that this is supposed to contain details of the story of the dragon, how it was killed and Smok, here we go.
Maybe this is what she's after.
This is, obviously, the right page.
So, we'll get both of these pages.
She can make sense of that.
I got some translations.
Check this out.
This is about the founding of Krakow.
"However well and fortunately situated the place was, "it was infested by a beast called Olophagus, as they call dragons.
" The Olophagus part is really interesting, because it means "swallows whole.
" Mmm! Which, I think, is kind of an interesting cue, about what the head-shape would be like, what the mouth-shape would be like, and what the behavior would be like.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think, immediately, of either snakes or, even better, alligators.
Alligator.
What do you think? I think alligator's going to be a good model for this.
I think somewhere like Louisiana, where we can actually look at the morphology, and how the teeth are placed, and what the mouth and throat action is like.
I think that's what we're going to have to do.
If we want to find out about a creature that swallows its prey whole, Louisiana is the place to be.
I'm here on the Cajun Lady with alligator expert Brian Crother, and our swamp guide, Dan Bourgeois.
If our dragon is to be a perfect killing machine, the alligator's hidden jaws might be just right for the job.
How big a alligator do you think we could get up here? Um, I don't know.
I'm looking over in the area over there.
We got a couple of nice ones.
We got a 12-footer, weighs about 700 lbs.
, very impressive.
We'll see how much better we get a view of her swallowing a whole chicken.
She's coming here.
Come on! Come play! I'd grab a thigh first, just to get him over here, and get him interested, calling.
He'll come.
Here you go! Here you go! Come on! You need a little more force than that.
Come here, my friend! Come on! Come play! Come on over here.
Come on, here you go.
Brian, you all set? They're coming close.
You all set? Two alligators coming.
Now, which one am I going to deal with? I don't want to deal with two of them.
Wait, wait.
Don't put your hand down.
Whoa! He's getting mad at you.
"You making me do all this jumping, all this work, and I'm not getting no chicken out of the deal!" Whoa! You won't always be able to see him.
Right, okay.
Watch when they put his nose up, and drop his tail.
Okay.
Come on.
There you go.
Get your hand up a little bit higher.
Oh! Close! You got to have the touch.
Give him one more try.
Luckily, before I use up all the chicken, a massive gator appears out of nowhere.
Wow.
And Dan decides that he'll feed this gator a whole chicken.
Look what I got for you now! That is a big piece of meat.
A whole chicken.
See it's jaws above the water? A big animal, they'll bite down on it, and hold on, and they'll do what's called a death roll, where they'll spin violently and tear large chunks off it, then swallow it whole.
Large alligator swallowing a whole chicken.
There we go! There you go! Look at that! You can see the skin under its jaw just flexing out! Oh, look at that! It's down.
That is impressive.
Kind of brings it's head back, letting gravity help it get down its throat.
Absolutely, yeah.
They make an open gullet.
Drop a whole sheep.
Exactly, exactly.
Virgins, I understand.
I think we can get that to work.
That'll be good.
This is the perfect head movement to give to our dragon, when it eats its prey.
It feels powerful, just looking at it.
Perfect, yeah.
I'm just going to start building the basic shape of that jaw.
I think this is working really nicely.
The one thing that strikes me is that it needs to be even more vicious, basically, because remember, this is the worst thing that these people could imagine their worst nightmare.
A lot of the illustrations of traditional medieval dragons have serious fangs.
We need snakes.
So, Francis and I have been sent to the best place in Krakow the Museum of Natural History.
We're about to get a look at a puff adder.
It has one of the worst sets of venomous fangs out there.
It's big, it's bad-tempered, and somehow we've convinced the snake handler to pull one out for us.
Oh! Whoa! This snake can strike half it's body length, at least.
There are reports of it sort of launching itself.
Steve and I are at the Krakow Museum of Natural History, in search of dragon fangs, and we're about to get our hands on a deadly puff adder.
It's got a very, very fast strike, and that's venom coming.
See the venom dripping into it's mouth? So that's They're very thin, but they're very, very long, You can see the muscles, right there! That's it, and they're sheathed.
They're covered in gums, and then, basically, you see they're hollow as well.
They're like a needle.
Yeah, yeah, it kind of splits into two.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's kind of following us.
The venom causes serious internal bleeding and destroys the flesh of the bite site, sometimes requiring amputation.
Our dragon definitely has to have the fangs of a puff adder, especially with dripping venom.
That's very good, given the fact that you saw them only for a few seconds.
You really got them in your head, haven't you? They kind of make an impression, don't they? I've never seen anything like that before.
The puff adder can give our dragon more than just venomous fangs.
This guy knows how to intimidate.
He can puff up to twice his normal girth when threatened.
This is why it's called a puff adder.
Oh, it's getting huge! They look scary.
They are genetically designed to look scary.
They are genetically designed to look intimidating.
If we take the dragon, and then it brings its chest out There's no better display of intimidation than that.
Yeah, I think that looks absolutely awesome so far.
There's one more snake I can't wait for Francis to see, but our snake handlers seem a little uncomfortable with it.
You have to open that.
Okay.
I think that should be okay.
Whoa!! Oh! I knew it! This is how we're going to use the weapon, like this.
Steve's very proud of himself for scaring the crap out of me.
But mark my words, I'll get him back.
This aquarium in Krakow has given us the most vicious feature that we can give our dragon, fangs.
Those details of the fangs, can you just work from the drawing? I'm also going to make the shape more like the snake, because Instead of being completely flat, I'm going to bring it back in, and shorten it a bit.
Yeah, okay.
It is looking so threatening at this point.
I mean, this is really, really capturing it.
But there's one more detail that I'm kind of thinking about, here.
We've got the offensive stuff nailed: the fangs and the quick grab motion, and all that.
But in the legend, it talks about this impenetrable armor, which was why the dragon was just about impossible to kill.
So, we need defensive as well.
According to the legend, the key to Smok's survival was his impenetrable scales, which no sword could pierce.
We need to outfit our dragon with the strongest possible armor the natural world has to offer.
When it comes to armor, alligators are an excellent place to start.
Alligators are the best model.
I think if you ask biologists in general, they'd say the crocodilians are the most heavily armored animal alive.
But to get close up and personal with the gator, you have to catch one.
And the best time to do that is at night.
So, we're going to use our flashlights and look for the eye shine.
As long as you keep the light on its eyes, it won't submerge.
The challenge is to find one big enough to give us a good sense of its armor, but not so big that it could swallow one of my limbs whole.
There's dozens of gators in the water.
The night vision will help us see them coming.
And eye shine also tells you something about the size of the animal, so if the eyes are real close, you have a small alligator.
When the eyes are this far apart, you know you might be in for something if you try to grab that animal.
Straight ahead, see that eye shine? Yeah.
Look at that! Oh, there's some eye shine! Oh, look at that! Straight ahead.
Right there.
There he is, in front of you.
So, would you grab him right around the jaw? No, I'd grab him behind the head.
Because if I'm not quick enough, then I'm in his jaw.
Grab him good, behind the head.
Wow.
That is impressive.
You might want to grab it up there.
There you go.
Some serious armor on the back.
It's like metal! That is really hard.
That is really hard.
They have this leathery skin, made out of keratin.
So, the same thing as our fingernails and the hoofs of a horse.
Exactly.
It's a protein.
Yeah, it's a protein, and it can be hard.
But that's not the real trick to the armor of alligators.
They have bony plates underneath the skin, that line the whole back surface of the animal.
Wow, right.
Right, right, right.
This guy's got amazing scales, I mean Lots of different kinds of scales.
He's got these diamond-shaped scales on its legs, and very square, armor-y scales on its back.
This is going to be great for our dragon.
the gator's belly seems vulnerable, which might prove problematic for our dragon.
One, two, three.
Luckily, a solution is close at hand.
You hold on to this.
You got to put it out there, just jig it around a little bit.
We need some indestructible armor for the belly of our beast.
And there's a creature, right here in Louisiana that might be the perfect candidate.
It's so tough, it can withstand the gator's bite, and we're about to find out why.
Oh! There he is! There he is! There he is! Whoa! Oh, letting go.
That's the best way to catch them.
You saw him and you just put it there in front of his nose.
And it don't take but a second.
He was right on it.
Some competition.
He's swimming towards you.
Oh, there he is.
There he is.
He's on there.
You may have this one.
Oh, yep, you got this one.
Just watch it.
Back up a little bit, let me grab the line.
The garfish.
It looks like it has scales like any other fish.
Hard to believe it will give us the armor we're looking for.
Nice! So, Dan, the gars aren't afraid of the gators at all? Alligators have a very hard time trying to even sink their teeth into them.
It's different from the alligator skin.
It's not quite as stiff, I would say.
Watch for snakes, too.
We'll be able to test its armor, while we prepare it for lunch.
You're not going to penetrate that.
That's a real hard bony structure.
Look at that! You can't even get the knife through.
It's just like very flexible armor.
Kind of like the mail of the old medieval warriors.
Chain mail.
The chain mail, yeah.
Delicious.
Yeah, really good.
One thing we could do is to take the bone structure, that two-tiered bone structure of an alligator, and the scales, the bony scales, of this gar, and put them all together to make the most armor-heavy animal on the planet.
So, I think we've got the armor nailed, which is just brilliant, but it's not a dragon unless it flies.
When you look again at the classical illustrations of dragons, these don't look, to me, like your normal bird wings.
Kathryn's right.
I've never seen a dragon with feathers, so I have another idea.
We're 12 miles outside Krakow, at a place the locals have aptly named "the bat cave.
" Sweet.
Nice to meet you, professor.
Francis.
We've come to the bat cave so we can find some bats.
And what we're hoping to do is get a good look at their wings, and apply that anatomy to our dragon.
Let me just find the night shot on here.
There we go.
Spooky green stuff.
Our plan is to catch a bat so that Francis can have a close-up look at the wings and draw them.
This cave is 1,000' deep, with high vaulted ceilings.
It's the ideal place for bats to hang out and avoid predators.
The hard part is finding them in the pitch black.
But we might be able to hear one, with some help.
They're using high-frequency sound.
Way too high for us to hear.
So, what this thing does is it takes that sound frequency and drops it down into an audible level.
Do we turn the light off? Yes.
Yes, yes.
Oh, there it is.
If you notice the design here, it's quite savvy, because what they do is they hit and then drop into the pocket here.
We wait then.
The only way I'm going to nail those dragon wings is to see a bat up close.
If he didn't think anything was there, it would've just flown straight through, but since he kept circling around here, he must've known there was something there.
I'm getting a bit tired of waiting around.
I mean, I'm no scientist, but I'm starting to feel like we're not going to get it.
Is there any way we can actively try to catch them, aside from just standing here.
Yeah, have a crack at it yourself.
You saw them.
Just jump.
See if you Like a cat.
Oh, hang on.
Oh, we've got one.
Okay.
Oh! Very nice.
Very nice.
Oh, lovely.
There you go.
Look at that face.
So, there you go.
There we go.
We've got a bat, finally.
He does not like.
He does not like it.
Yeah, yeah.
Check the face out.
But this is the bit I want to show you.
See the wing here? Okay, what we have here, is we have the elbow here, okay? Then this is the forearm, down to the wrist.
These are the fingers.
So you can see, the fingers are This one here is really, really small.
That is the first finger, the second finger, the third.
You can see this is a hand.
This is a hand that's turned into a wing.
The structure of these bat wings are perfect for our dragon.
The only problem that I see is: how big do these have to be in order to lift our dragon off the ground? Oh, there he goes.
They have to be bigger.
I think that's looking really good.
So, now that we have a pretty cool model, we need to test it out in the right environment.
We're about to time travel.
We're entering a place where dragons were thought to hunt, and where ancient creatures still lurk.
Things like wolves, lynx, bison, and wild boar.
We've recruited a tracker to help us navigate one of the most ancient forests in Europe.
This is just the kind of place our dragon would hunt in, when it wasn't killing humans.
And in a forest this ancient, anything could be lurking behind the trees.
Shh.
Shh! That could be boar.
That sounds like a wild boar.
They are dangerous as well.
Really? They've got massive, sharp tusks.
They are very, very powerful.
And if threatened, they will charge you.
Most prey species don't give up without a fight.
How fast are they? There's loads of them.
That's amazing.
The mother's looking at us.
Oh yeah.
They're big.
Quiet! I think they've seen us.
Oh yeah I see that.
There's loads.
There's piglets that are still there.
Yeah, ok, I think he stopped.
He's concerned about the mom.
Yeah, cause she'll defend her young as much as she can.
If she feels threatened, she'll come for us.
Right.
But you gotta see just how stealthy he's gonna be.
We didn't get within 1000 yards of that.
Those wild boars are perfect for a dragon meal.
The only problem is they're so low to the ground, we have to figure out how our dragon is gonna swoop in and grab them.
Look how dense it is.
Yeah, there are different layers.
- And this is what our dragon would have to hump through.
- Right.
It can't be You know, it can't be like a massive 100 feet lizard.
Yeah, pulling trees apart, it's never gonna find any food.
Like most predators, it's gotta be roughly equivalent to the size of its prey.
This is where the aerial predator doesn't make any sense.
Cause if you've got a big bat-like dragon Right.
Getting Unless we make it really small Yeah, I mean, flapping through this, you're gonna make a lot of noise.
And you're gonna do a lot of this, right? - At the very least, it has to glide.
- Gliding we can do.
In fact, I think that may be a great compromise They used the trees to gain height and then glide down.
Ok Scott, take a look at the air, the canopy here.
It's obviously really thick in this forest so a large creature isn't gonna be able to fly through here very easily, so.
We've hopefully come to a compromise: an animal that glides.
Happy with that? Now being here, it just changes everything.
Seeing all this, it seems impossible for a big creature to fly through here and hunt effectively.
Cool, so go to work and do some research.
I've got my marching orders.
No, I think that will work really well.
Lizards glide, there's blind squirrels Yeah, imagine this creature, using the forest, sort of structurally, moving up into the heights of it, into the canopy, watching for prey like the wild boar, you know on the ground.
and then swooping down from the trees, and you know, when it's in an urban setting, it can do that to people.
I mean I think that would be really cool.
Maybe it has some sort of warning coloration underneath, some bright red or something Make it red.
Red.
Yeah.
I like red.
Alright, I really like where this is going.
This is like a dragon I have never seen before.
It is ferocious, it is scary, it's different, But it needs to breathe fire.
Yes, it does.
I think I've got an idea.
Let me just run this by you.
So basically there's no animals out there that produce fire.
Except for humans, of course.
But in order to make fire you basically need three things.
A fuel source, we need air or oxygen, and we need heat or some kind of spark to start the whole reaction.
So if we can somehow figure out how to harness for example the methane in the dragon's belly, instead of, you know, coming out the back end, - we can shunt it towards the front.
- Yeah.
And if we can somehow generate a spark we might be able to borrow something from for example, electric eels.
and that way, we could generate fire.
I've got an idea.
Let's use the hollow snake things as conduits for the spark, so we'll need bottom fangs as well.
What do you think? I think he's gonna have really bad breath but no one is gonna get close enough to notice.
I'm back in North America with Scott.
and we're going to the perfect place to figure out how to put the fire in our firedragon.
The home of the pyrotechnic wizard.
Scott.
Good to meet you.
Welcome to the dragon's lair.
- Alright.
- Nice.
I've sent Tom my harebrained plan to create fire, and he's mocked up a mechanical dragon to see if any of this will work.
So this is the dragon's head, right here? Yeah, that's good Right about here is good.
Yeah, if we could point it away from my truck.
Down range.
In order to make fire, we're going to take the pressurized fuel source from there.
We're going to transfer it to this tank, which is basically an accumulator tank.
Lizards and birds, They've all got this gizzard, this really muscular gizzard and you know, this proventriculus, sort of the fore-part of the stomach, That's kind of like a holding tank.
We could think of that as the holding tank, a place where it's going to be delivered.
And then we have a big valve.
I don't know what a valve would be in the biological world.
Well I mean there's all There's sphincters that Sphincters close off the stomach.
So, this thing is just gonna like blow fuel out that way? You're saying the air and the methane are gonna mix right here at the base of the throat? In the mouth basically.
In the mouth right where it exits the dragon's mouth.
And now we need a spark.
Whoa! I knew you were going to light that.
That's awesome! Wow, that's great.
That will give us enough heat to ignite our fuel from the stomach.
So, we're arming the dragon.
Dragon fire ball test.
3, 2, 1 Whoa Oh, man! That's amazing! That is freaking awesome! Did you feel that heat? I wonder if I'm singed.
Jeez, with the noise, and you're just like That was amazing.
Oh! What happens if you hold it longer? Oh! Whoa, that is hot! That is awesome! Where'd you get that? What is that? I think I have the perfect victim for this mechanical dragon.
What's that? Who's that? This is our other beast hunter, Steve.
So, this is a little payback for the snake stunt that he did to me.
He looks like a superhero.
Is he? Uhh, in his own mind.
All right, see you later, Steve.
Three, two, one.
Light him up! Oh! Oh, God! Nice! I mean, what's crazy is that, with all the weapons it has, with the claws and the teeth This thing would just be maimed.
I mean, just stun them with a bunch of bursts of fire.
The basic shock and awe approach.
Absolutely.
So cool.
Just one more for the road.
Those fireballs were so awesome.
I hate to leave, but we've got a beast movie to watch.
That was amazing! That's very good.
That's That's like my absolute favorite.
In some ways, it's surprising that biology hasn't figured how to make fire.
Yeah, that is true.
The key to building this beast, arming with incredible offensive and defensive powers.
by giving our fire dragon titanium-tough armour, an alligator's jaw mixed with snake fangs and some deadly bursts of fire we've got ourselves a beast legend.
Start with a 500-year-old story.
This is a dragon! Add mysterious footprints.
People have been finding these footprints all over the place.
A slice of swamp monster.
Wait Don't put your hand down.
Whoa! One cup of cave creature.
Stir in fear from a forest.
Shh! Shh! And flambé.
Whoa! Stories of terrifying monsters are told the world over.
Some are myths but others are believed to be real.
Now a team of investigators will track down clues and find evidence for the beast behind the legend.
The quest, to build the creature, bring it to life and unleash it on the modern world.
Steve and Francis are in southern Poland, on the trail of a fire-breathing beast.
The rest of the team are in the Beast Lab, searching for the origins of the legend.
So, dragons, possibly the best beast legend of them all.
Really widespread around the world, but some of the best ones are in Europe, and there's a particular one in Poland that I think will be really great to follow up on: Smok the Dragon.
So, let's just check out the legend.
A Polish kingdom is terrorized by a deadly dragon named Smok.
It scorches fields and devours herds.
Only the sacrifice of virgins appeases it.
The king decrees that he who slays the beast shall inherit the throne.
Many warriors try to pierce the dragon's scales but fail.
Then a humble shoemaker takes up the challenge.
He stuffs a sheep with molten sulfur and tempts the dragon from its lair.
To douse the burning pain, the dragon, Smok, drinks half a river and finally meets its end.
You know, with these things, I always just think, "What incentive to lose your virginity.
" You can't be fed to a dragon.
This story has inspired the team to imagine what this beast might be, and to bring it to virtual life.
We've got wonderful images here of dragons from all over the world.
British dragons, the Asian ones as well.
What most of them tend to have in common is: wings and breathing fire.
Fire is absolutely unprecedented in the animal world, as far as I'm aware.
I've never heard of any animal, terrestrial or aquatic, using fire.
This is going to be a challenge.
So, a great place to start, for this one, is Wawel Castle, which is in Krakow.
There are, allegedly, dragon bones.
So, where Steve and Francis got to go is right here.
Francis and I are here in Krakow, Poland, to find the famous Smok Dragon bones at Wawel Castle.
Could you translate this plaque here? Yeah.
It says that the Polish Prince, called Krakus, in 730, over here, he killed the dragon, and he founded the castle over here.
It's not that dissimilar to my house.
To your house? It's name is Wawel Castle, and it's absolutely massive.
Bit tatty compared to my courtyard.
This is definitely Dragon Central.
Look, there's little dragons there as well, just on the edge of those little decorations.
We've got pretty rare access to these bones.
Oh, there we go.
That's them there.
These are the dragon bones.
For centuries, the bones of a dragon named Smok have hung on this cathedral wall, or so they say.
It's kind of weird, though, how there's just these bones, hanging in front of a cathedral entrance.
Can't really see the top.
We're going to have to get a closer look.
I believe there's a ladder somewhere.
This is a sacred place.
I think what happened is they found these bones, and they had absolutely no idea what they were, but they brought them here, because this is a sacred place.
They thought these were really unusual bones.
They couldn't think what animal it came from, so they assumed they were dragon's.
If we take some measurements, and then you sort of draw me a dragon with those sorts of dimensions, this could help us with a sense of scale.
These are supposed to be the dragon's rib bones, skull and femur.
But the only way to know for sure is to get up close and have a look.
I think we're going to run out of tape, though.
That's the only problem.
2'10" to the chain.
I know what that is.
This big, long bone here isn't even a rib.
That's a jaw bone from a whale, undoubtedly.
This is a jawbone? Of a whale.
I just want to have a quick, closer look at this skull.
I could see how you could think that that head is a dragon head.
These aren't from the same animal at all.
It's really the skull of a rhino.
That could even be a woolly rhino, so a really old, sort of ice-age creature.
There's only two creatures that have got a thigh bone that big, and that's probably an elephant or a mammoth.
Back then, they thought this was a real-deal dragon, right? What we should do is, the dragon we're going to create, create it from what they thought it looked like.
We can create the dragon that was in their mind, and in their story.
Time to find a nice and dry place and pull out the ink.
Yeah, the skull was very, very, sort of yeah.
A rhino skull really does suit it, actually.
So, if that's 75 cm, and the ribs are 3.
7, so they'll be five times as long as the head.
So that's one, two, three, four almost off the page, dude.
Look at this thing! No, higher! Higher! It's the full length Our dragon's going to look like this.
Do you see that? That's perfect.
Maybe this is full of helium.
It's a blimp.
So, the leg's like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Look at this thing! Yeah, that's brilliant.
Looks like an overweight dragon.
It's a blimp, isn't it? Imagine this thing moving, like this.
He can't reach the ground! Which direction does it go? It just rolls.
All right, so I'm going to make what Francis drew.
All right.
That's it.
I'm finding this dragon is not sufficiently fearsome.
This is a very inauspicious beginning.
While the Beast Lab tries to figure out what to do with the dragon's body, they've sent us to investigate another dragon clue: dragon footprints.
A lot of them just get exposed through weather, with erosion and everything else, suddenly they appear, and that's how, over the years, with humans walking through these woods, whatever, they'll come across these rocks with just a great big footprint in the middle of it.
This is cool! Phenomenal.
Absolutely phenomenal.
They're pretty huge.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
You've got a good footprint there, one there, and one there, and then one there.
So, you would expect it to be left, right, left.
And it's slightly throwing its foot in, and maybe even potentially moving direction.
So, it's going boing, boing, boing.
People have been finding these footprints all over the place around here for hundreds of years, and thinking they were dragons, or devils, or some weird creature.
And it was only in the 1950s that it was determined that they were actually dinosaur footprints.
So, how old do you think these are? These are from the early Jurassic, which is 200 million years ago.
Holy cow.
Scientists believe these tracks could belong to a little known dinosaur called kayentapus.
A top predator of it's day, it stood 7' tall, and is a close relative to T-Rex.
We're saying this is right leg.
That's right leg to right leg.
Yeah.
This is 170.
Yeah, so that's a 170 stride, a 170 cm stride, which is a big stride, really.
That's very cool.
I'd say that's very dragon-esque.
I can see exactly why they thought it was a dragon print.
I mean, it's perfect.
Well, the great thing about those feet is that they're from theropod dinosaurs.
They've got that classic three-toed morphology, and that kind of pegs them as very fast, agile predators.
This can really give us a good start towards a fleet footed and highly intelligent dragon.
You worst nightmare would be true, if a theropod were chasing after you.
It really feeds into that whole sort of bones, footprints "Here be dragons.
" I'm thinking we can start building this dragon from the ground up now.
But we've got a long way to go.
We know from the legend that our dragon was a killing machine.
So, Kathryn has sent us here to the Jagiellonian University Library to track down some 16th century manuscripts.
They might reveal some of the juicy details about our beast.
Wait till you see this one.
So, this could be a bestiary.
This will be a representation of animals they thought existed.
it's a pig-reptile.
Speculation, you know? There's a lot of unknowns back then.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's where people's imagination would run riot, and they build these animals.
They build these beasts.
There's a dragon, dragging that guy's body.
Oh, God! Yeah! She said that this is supposed to contain details of the story of the dragon, how it was killed and Smok, here we go.
Maybe this is what she's after.
This is, obviously, the right page.
So, we'll get both of these pages.
She can make sense of that.
I got some translations.
Check this out.
This is about the founding of Krakow.
"However well and fortunately situated the place was, "it was infested by a beast called Olophagus, as they call dragons.
" The Olophagus part is really interesting, because it means "swallows whole.
" Mmm! Which, I think, is kind of an interesting cue, about what the head-shape would be like, what the mouth-shape would be like, and what the behavior would be like.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think, immediately, of either snakes or, even better, alligators.
Alligator.
What do you think? I think alligator's going to be a good model for this.
I think somewhere like Louisiana, where we can actually look at the morphology, and how the teeth are placed, and what the mouth and throat action is like.
I think that's what we're going to have to do.
If we want to find out about a creature that swallows its prey whole, Louisiana is the place to be.
I'm here on the Cajun Lady with alligator expert Brian Crother, and our swamp guide, Dan Bourgeois.
If our dragon is to be a perfect killing machine, the alligator's hidden jaws might be just right for the job.
How big a alligator do you think we could get up here? Um, I don't know.
I'm looking over in the area over there.
We got a couple of nice ones.
We got a 12-footer, weighs about 700 lbs.
, very impressive.
We'll see how much better we get a view of her swallowing a whole chicken.
She's coming here.
Come on! Come play! I'd grab a thigh first, just to get him over here, and get him interested, calling.
He'll come.
Here you go! Here you go! Come on! You need a little more force than that.
Come here, my friend! Come on! Come play! Come on over here.
Come on, here you go.
Brian, you all set? They're coming close.
You all set? Two alligators coming.
Now, which one am I going to deal with? I don't want to deal with two of them.
Wait, wait.
Don't put your hand down.
Whoa! He's getting mad at you.
"You making me do all this jumping, all this work, and I'm not getting no chicken out of the deal!" Whoa! You won't always be able to see him.
Right, okay.
Watch when they put his nose up, and drop his tail.
Okay.
Come on.
There you go.
Get your hand up a little bit higher.
Oh! Close! You got to have the touch.
Give him one more try.
Luckily, before I use up all the chicken, a massive gator appears out of nowhere.
Wow.
And Dan decides that he'll feed this gator a whole chicken.
Look what I got for you now! That is a big piece of meat.
A whole chicken.
See it's jaws above the water? A big animal, they'll bite down on it, and hold on, and they'll do what's called a death roll, where they'll spin violently and tear large chunks off it, then swallow it whole.
Large alligator swallowing a whole chicken.
There we go! There you go! Look at that! You can see the skin under its jaw just flexing out! Oh, look at that! It's down.
That is impressive.
Kind of brings it's head back, letting gravity help it get down its throat.
Absolutely, yeah.
They make an open gullet.
Drop a whole sheep.
Exactly, exactly.
Virgins, I understand.
I think we can get that to work.
That'll be good.
This is the perfect head movement to give to our dragon, when it eats its prey.
It feels powerful, just looking at it.
Perfect, yeah.
I'm just going to start building the basic shape of that jaw.
I think this is working really nicely.
The one thing that strikes me is that it needs to be even more vicious, basically, because remember, this is the worst thing that these people could imagine their worst nightmare.
A lot of the illustrations of traditional medieval dragons have serious fangs.
We need snakes.
So, Francis and I have been sent to the best place in Krakow the Museum of Natural History.
We're about to get a look at a puff adder.
It has one of the worst sets of venomous fangs out there.
It's big, it's bad-tempered, and somehow we've convinced the snake handler to pull one out for us.
Oh! Whoa! This snake can strike half it's body length, at least.
There are reports of it sort of launching itself.
Steve and I are at the Krakow Museum of Natural History, in search of dragon fangs, and we're about to get our hands on a deadly puff adder.
It's got a very, very fast strike, and that's venom coming.
See the venom dripping into it's mouth? So that's They're very thin, but they're very, very long, You can see the muscles, right there! That's it, and they're sheathed.
They're covered in gums, and then, basically, you see they're hollow as well.
They're like a needle.
Yeah, yeah, it kind of splits into two.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's kind of following us.
The venom causes serious internal bleeding and destroys the flesh of the bite site, sometimes requiring amputation.
Our dragon definitely has to have the fangs of a puff adder, especially with dripping venom.
That's very good, given the fact that you saw them only for a few seconds.
You really got them in your head, haven't you? They kind of make an impression, don't they? I've never seen anything like that before.
The puff adder can give our dragon more than just venomous fangs.
This guy knows how to intimidate.
He can puff up to twice his normal girth when threatened.
This is why it's called a puff adder.
Oh, it's getting huge! They look scary.
They are genetically designed to look scary.
They are genetically designed to look intimidating.
If we take the dragon, and then it brings its chest out There's no better display of intimidation than that.
Yeah, I think that looks absolutely awesome so far.
There's one more snake I can't wait for Francis to see, but our snake handlers seem a little uncomfortable with it.
You have to open that.
Okay.
I think that should be okay.
Whoa!! Oh! I knew it! This is how we're going to use the weapon, like this.
Steve's very proud of himself for scaring the crap out of me.
But mark my words, I'll get him back.
This aquarium in Krakow has given us the most vicious feature that we can give our dragon, fangs.
Those details of the fangs, can you just work from the drawing? I'm also going to make the shape more like the snake, because Instead of being completely flat, I'm going to bring it back in, and shorten it a bit.
Yeah, okay.
It is looking so threatening at this point.
I mean, this is really, really capturing it.
But there's one more detail that I'm kind of thinking about, here.
We've got the offensive stuff nailed: the fangs and the quick grab motion, and all that.
But in the legend, it talks about this impenetrable armor, which was why the dragon was just about impossible to kill.
So, we need defensive as well.
According to the legend, the key to Smok's survival was his impenetrable scales, which no sword could pierce.
We need to outfit our dragon with the strongest possible armor the natural world has to offer.
When it comes to armor, alligators are an excellent place to start.
Alligators are the best model.
I think if you ask biologists in general, they'd say the crocodilians are the most heavily armored animal alive.
But to get close up and personal with the gator, you have to catch one.
And the best time to do that is at night.
So, we're going to use our flashlights and look for the eye shine.
As long as you keep the light on its eyes, it won't submerge.
The challenge is to find one big enough to give us a good sense of its armor, but not so big that it could swallow one of my limbs whole.
There's dozens of gators in the water.
The night vision will help us see them coming.
And eye shine also tells you something about the size of the animal, so if the eyes are real close, you have a small alligator.
When the eyes are this far apart, you know you might be in for something if you try to grab that animal.
Straight ahead, see that eye shine? Yeah.
Look at that! Oh, there's some eye shine! Oh, look at that! Straight ahead.
Right there.
There he is, in front of you.
So, would you grab him right around the jaw? No, I'd grab him behind the head.
Because if I'm not quick enough, then I'm in his jaw.
Grab him good, behind the head.
Wow.
That is impressive.
You might want to grab it up there.
There you go.
Some serious armor on the back.
It's like metal! That is really hard.
That is really hard.
They have this leathery skin, made out of keratin.
So, the same thing as our fingernails and the hoofs of a horse.
Exactly.
It's a protein.
Yeah, it's a protein, and it can be hard.
But that's not the real trick to the armor of alligators.
They have bony plates underneath the skin, that line the whole back surface of the animal.
Wow, right.
Right, right, right.
This guy's got amazing scales, I mean Lots of different kinds of scales.
He's got these diamond-shaped scales on its legs, and very square, armor-y scales on its back.
This is going to be great for our dragon.
the gator's belly seems vulnerable, which might prove problematic for our dragon.
One, two, three.
Luckily, a solution is close at hand.
You hold on to this.
You got to put it out there, just jig it around a little bit.
We need some indestructible armor for the belly of our beast.
And there's a creature, right here in Louisiana that might be the perfect candidate.
It's so tough, it can withstand the gator's bite, and we're about to find out why.
Oh! There he is! There he is! There he is! Whoa! Oh, letting go.
That's the best way to catch them.
You saw him and you just put it there in front of his nose.
And it don't take but a second.
He was right on it.
Some competition.
He's swimming towards you.
Oh, there he is.
There he is.
He's on there.
You may have this one.
Oh, yep, you got this one.
Just watch it.
Back up a little bit, let me grab the line.
The garfish.
It looks like it has scales like any other fish.
Hard to believe it will give us the armor we're looking for.
Nice! So, Dan, the gars aren't afraid of the gators at all? Alligators have a very hard time trying to even sink their teeth into them.
It's different from the alligator skin.
It's not quite as stiff, I would say.
Watch for snakes, too.
We'll be able to test its armor, while we prepare it for lunch.
You're not going to penetrate that.
That's a real hard bony structure.
Look at that! You can't even get the knife through.
It's just like very flexible armor.
Kind of like the mail of the old medieval warriors.
Chain mail.
The chain mail, yeah.
Delicious.
Yeah, really good.
One thing we could do is to take the bone structure, that two-tiered bone structure of an alligator, and the scales, the bony scales, of this gar, and put them all together to make the most armor-heavy animal on the planet.
So, I think we've got the armor nailed, which is just brilliant, but it's not a dragon unless it flies.
When you look again at the classical illustrations of dragons, these don't look, to me, like your normal bird wings.
Kathryn's right.
I've never seen a dragon with feathers, so I have another idea.
We're 12 miles outside Krakow, at a place the locals have aptly named "the bat cave.
" Sweet.
Nice to meet you, professor.
Francis.
We've come to the bat cave so we can find some bats.
And what we're hoping to do is get a good look at their wings, and apply that anatomy to our dragon.
Let me just find the night shot on here.
There we go.
Spooky green stuff.
Our plan is to catch a bat so that Francis can have a close-up look at the wings and draw them.
This cave is 1,000' deep, with high vaulted ceilings.
It's the ideal place for bats to hang out and avoid predators.
The hard part is finding them in the pitch black.
But we might be able to hear one, with some help.
They're using high-frequency sound.
Way too high for us to hear.
So, what this thing does is it takes that sound frequency and drops it down into an audible level.
Do we turn the light off? Yes.
Yes, yes.
Oh, there it is.
If you notice the design here, it's quite savvy, because what they do is they hit and then drop into the pocket here.
We wait then.
The only way I'm going to nail those dragon wings is to see a bat up close.
If he didn't think anything was there, it would've just flown straight through, but since he kept circling around here, he must've known there was something there.
I'm getting a bit tired of waiting around.
I mean, I'm no scientist, but I'm starting to feel like we're not going to get it.
Is there any way we can actively try to catch them, aside from just standing here.
Yeah, have a crack at it yourself.
You saw them.
Just jump.
See if you Like a cat.
Oh, hang on.
Oh, we've got one.
Okay.
Oh! Very nice.
Very nice.
Oh, lovely.
There you go.
Look at that face.
So, there you go.
There we go.
We've got a bat, finally.
He does not like.
He does not like it.
Yeah, yeah.
Check the face out.
But this is the bit I want to show you.
See the wing here? Okay, what we have here, is we have the elbow here, okay? Then this is the forearm, down to the wrist.
These are the fingers.
So you can see, the fingers are This one here is really, really small.
That is the first finger, the second finger, the third.
You can see this is a hand.
This is a hand that's turned into a wing.
The structure of these bat wings are perfect for our dragon.
The only problem that I see is: how big do these have to be in order to lift our dragon off the ground? Oh, there he goes.
They have to be bigger.
I think that's looking really good.
So, now that we have a pretty cool model, we need to test it out in the right environment.
We're about to time travel.
We're entering a place where dragons were thought to hunt, and where ancient creatures still lurk.
Things like wolves, lynx, bison, and wild boar.
We've recruited a tracker to help us navigate one of the most ancient forests in Europe.
This is just the kind of place our dragon would hunt in, when it wasn't killing humans.
And in a forest this ancient, anything could be lurking behind the trees.
Shh.
Shh! That could be boar.
That sounds like a wild boar.
They are dangerous as well.
Really? They've got massive, sharp tusks.
They are very, very powerful.
And if threatened, they will charge you.
Most prey species don't give up without a fight.
How fast are they? There's loads of them.
That's amazing.
The mother's looking at us.
Oh yeah.
They're big.
Quiet! I think they've seen us.
Oh yeah I see that.
There's loads.
There's piglets that are still there.
Yeah, ok, I think he stopped.
He's concerned about the mom.
Yeah, cause she'll defend her young as much as she can.
If she feels threatened, she'll come for us.
Right.
But you gotta see just how stealthy he's gonna be.
We didn't get within 1000 yards of that.
Those wild boars are perfect for a dragon meal.
The only problem is they're so low to the ground, we have to figure out how our dragon is gonna swoop in and grab them.
Look how dense it is.
Yeah, there are different layers.
- And this is what our dragon would have to hump through.
- Right.
It can't be You know, it can't be like a massive 100 feet lizard.
Yeah, pulling trees apart, it's never gonna find any food.
Like most predators, it's gotta be roughly equivalent to the size of its prey.
This is where the aerial predator doesn't make any sense.
Cause if you've got a big bat-like dragon Right.
Getting Unless we make it really small Yeah, I mean, flapping through this, you're gonna make a lot of noise.
And you're gonna do a lot of this, right? - At the very least, it has to glide.
- Gliding we can do.
In fact, I think that may be a great compromise They used the trees to gain height and then glide down.
Ok Scott, take a look at the air, the canopy here.
It's obviously really thick in this forest so a large creature isn't gonna be able to fly through here very easily, so.
We've hopefully come to a compromise: an animal that glides.
Happy with that? Now being here, it just changes everything.
Seeing all this, it seems impossible for a big creature to fly through here and hunt effectively.
Cool, so go to work and do some research.
I've got my marching orders.
No, I think that will work really well.
Lizards glide, there's blind squirrels Yeah, imagine this creature, using the forest, sort of structurally, moving up into the heights of it, into the canopy, watching for prey like the wild boar, you know on the ground.
and then swooping down from the trees, and you know, when it's in an urban setting, it can do that to people.
I mean I think that would be really cool.
Maybe it has some sort of warning coloration underneath, some bright red or something Make it red.
Red.
Yeah.
I like red.
Alright, I really like where this is going.
This is like a dragon I have never seen before.
It is ferocious, it is scary, it's different, But it needs to breathe fire.
Yes, it does.
I think I've got an idea.
Let me just run this by you.
So basically there's no animals out there that produce fire.
Except for humans, of course.
But in order to make fire you basically need three things.
A fuel source, we need air or oxygen, and we need heat or some kind of spark to start the whole reaction.
So if we can somehow figure out how to harness for example the methane in the dragon's belly, instead of, you know, coming out the back end, - we can shunt it towards the front.
- Yeah.
And if we can somehow generate a spark we might be able to borrow something from for example, electric eels.
and that way, we could generate fire.
I've got an idea.
Let's use the hollow snake things as conduits for the spark, so we'll need bottom fangs as well.
What do you think? I think he's gonna have really bad breath but no one is gonna get close enough to notice.
I'm back in North America with Scott.
and we're going to the perfect place to figure out how to put the fire in our firedragon.
The home of the pyrotechnic wizard.
Scott.
Good to meet you.
Welcome to the dragon's lair.
- Alright.
- Nice.
I've sent Tom my harebrained plan to create fire, and he's mocked up a mechanical dragon to see if any of this will work.
So this is the dragon's head, right here? Yeah, that's good Right about here is good.
Yeah, if we could point it away from my truck.
Down range.
In order to make fire, we're going to take the pressurized fuel source from there.
We're going to transfer it to this tank, which is basically an accumulator tank.
Lizards and birds, They've all got this gizzard, this really muscular gizzard and you know, this proventriculus, sort of the fore-part of the stomach, That's kind of like a holding tank.
We could think of that as the holding tank, a place where it's going to be delivered.
And then we have a big valve.
I don't know what a valve would be in the biological world.
Well I mean there's all There's sphincters that Sphincters close off the stomach.
So, this thing is just gonna like blow fuel out that way? You're saying the air and the methane are gonna mix right here at the base of the throat? In the mouth basically.
In the mouth right where it exits the dragon's mouth.
And now we need a spark.
Whoa! I knew you were going to light that.
That's awesome! Wow, that's great.
That will give us enough heat to ignite our fuel from the stomach.
So, we're arming the dragon.
Dragon fire ball test.
3, 2, 1 Whoa Oh, man! That's amazing! That is freaking awesome! Did you feel that heat? I wonder if I'm singed.
Jeez, with the noise, and you're just like That was amazing.
Oh! What happens if you hold it longer? Oh! Whoa, that is hot! That is awesome! Where'd you get that? What is that? I think I have the perfect victim for this mechanical dragon.
What's that? Who's that? This is our other beast hunter, Steve.
So, this is a little payback for the snake stunt that he did to me.
He looks like a superhero.
Is he? Uhh, in his own mind.
All right, see you later, Steve.
Three, two, one.
Light him up! Oh! Oh, God! Nice! I mean, what's crazy is that, with all the weapons it has, with the claws and the teeth This thing would just be maimed.
I mean, just stun them with a bunch of bursts of fire.
The basic shock and awe approach.
Absolutely.
So cool.
Just one more for the road.
Those fireballs were so awesome.
I hate to leave, but we've got a beast movie to watch.
That was amazing! That's very good.
That's That's like my absolute favorite.
In some ways, it's surprising that biology hasn't figured how to make fire.
Yeah, that is true.
The key to building this beast, arming with incredible offensive and defensive powers.
by giving our fire dragon titanium-tough armour, an alligator's jaw mixed with snake fangs and some deadly bursts of fire we've got ourselves a beast legend.