Quote Originally Posted by ScottyDsntKnow View Post
I like to go with the Flight of Dragons theory of dragonflight. They have a set of very hard teeth that can grind up limestone. They grind this limestone up and swallow it into a crop or a second stomach of sorts. There it is broken down into Hydrogen. This serves 2 purposes. 1st is it makes the dragon super buoyant and getting off the ground and staying airborne requires much much less effort than previously thought. 2nd is that it means they can be cold blooded and still breathe fire. Exhaling hydrogen from the air bladder will make maintaining flight more difficult or impossible after a point but some sort of bio ignition system in the top of the mouth would ignite the hydrogen on its way out.

Therefore you could have a flying dragon larger than what would be normally possible without an air bladder, cold blooded to require a lot less food than a warm blooded animal and extended brumation periods would allow a low intake of food for an animal so large. Small herd of cattle for an animal the size of a small airliner like a 737 could easily sustain it for a year or more which would keep the food supply from being too depleted, even with multiple animals.
I like that theory!

It does seem that many sources describe dragons as being extremely long-lived, so in addition to spending a lot of that time brumating they probably also have a very slow reproductive rate, which would be necessary in order to keep the population density low enough to not exhaust the food supply. Maybe they are like 17-year cicadas, and every 113 years (113 because it is a prime number, it is over a century, and it ends in 13) they all come out at once to breed.

And then every 113 years they go on rampages, which is just often enough to keep the knights interested in making periodic attempts, thus providing the occasional interim mineral-rich snack. Otherwise they might have to gut-load the cattle with iron filings.