Flight

Not all dragons fly, but flying dragons are more common than those that stay on the ground.

Chinese dragons are always shown flying among clouds, even though they don’t have wings! According to an ancient Chinese scholar called Wang Fu, the Chinese dragon can fly because of a lump on its head called a chi mu. Somehow this enables the dragon to lift off the ground.

Earlier Chinese dragons did have wings. In the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) dragons were often painted with small feathery wings.

People often say that it would be impossible for a dragon to fly because its body would be too heavy for its wings to lift it off the ground. In his book The Flight of Dragons, Peter Dickinson has a theory to explain how dragons fly. If the dragon’s body is full of hydrogen created by a chemical reaction between calcium (from its bones) and hydrochloric acid (from its stomach) it would actually be very light. Its wings wouldn’t have to be particularly big or strong to lift the dragon’s lighter-than-air body.