All Wings Considered
We’re catching some air this week, and talking things with wings!
Quandaries range from the practical (how do different animal and insect wings differ?) to the ethereal (this includes dragons). Here’s the questions we’ll be answering…
For our next Outside/Inbox roundup, we’re looking for questions about healing! We’re casting a wide net here: homeopathy, neuroplasticity, chronic disease, plant resiliency. … Send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or you can call our hotline: 844-GO-OTTER.
Featuring Jonathan Rader, Tim Burbery, Lauren Ponisio, and Andrew Howley.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
The video of the sandhill crane landing lives on TikTok.
Here’s that video of an albatross walking on land after years at sea.
Timothy Burbery is the author of Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events.
The hypothesis connecting the mythical griffin and Protoceratops fossils was popularized by Adrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times.
Here's a paper critiquing Mayor's interpretations, "Did the horned dinosaur Protoceratops inspire the griffin?"
A USGS volcanologist on what geologists missed for so long in the stories of Pele, from indigenous Hawaiian oral tradition.
SUPPORT
To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.
Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported produced and mixed by Nate Hegyi, Marina Henke, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, dozeoff, and Cercles Nouvelles.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am your host, Nate Hegyi. And we've got one of our producers here, Marina Henke. Hey, Marina.
Marina Henke: Hello. Hello. All right. Nate, so I have a story to start the day with.
Nate Hegyi: All right, hit me.
Marina Henke: It starts in New Mexico, where last fall, I got to watch something called the sandhill crane migration.
Nate Hegyi: Ooh.
Marina Henke: To just hit some main points here. Um, the sandhill crane migration it happens every year. And so where I was, was in New Mexico, and it was a place called Bosque del Apache.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Marina Henke: So I get there at dusk and it's the perfect time to see them, because this is the moment where they are lifting up into the air, and they're moving into the water to hang out for the night.
Nate Hegyi: Okay. So like if you were a professional photographer, this would be like the time to get that quintessential shot of the birds lifting off of the ground, some new Mexican sunset in the background.
Marina Henke: And I will say, those photographers, they're doing the right thing because it is maybe like one of the most magical things in the outdoors I have ever seen.
Nate Hegyi: I believe it.
Marina Henke: Except I was there with my sister's boyfriend, and at one point he hands me a set of binoculars and he's like, look through these and I want you to really look at these birds.
Nate Hegyi: Okay?
Marina Henke: And so I look through them and it's totally magical right there lifting up the desert sun there in the air.
[SANDHILL CRANE FIELD TAPE COMES IN]
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Marina Henke: And then they land.
[MUX IN, Capering, Blue Dot]
Marina Henke: Now I'm going to send you a link right now, and I want you to watch a video of sandhill cranes landing.
Nate Hegyi: All right… (Laughs). Ooh. I'm watching a sandhill crane kind of land wipe out a little bit and then recover, like everything's cool. I didn't look like a total goofball when I was landing.
Marina Henke: They’re legs are, like, thrown out in front of them. It's like they're kind of sliding into second base or something.
Nate Hegyi: It reminds me of, like when a gymnast jumps off a springboard and then they kind of side stumble and, you know, they just lost a bunch of points. And then they try to recover and like, they bow and but you can tell like they're kind of crying on the inside.
Marina Henke: All I'm saying is that there was a comment on Reddit and it says, quote, it's like an AI that's never seen a bird land before. (Laughs).
Marina Henke: I went back and forth with some ornithologists on what's happening here. Now they totally objected to me saying they're goofy, but he says that that way that they parachute down, it lets them land in some of the, like, biggest, fastest gusts of winds that they've ever seen.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, okay. So there's a reason behind the slightly goofy landing.
Marina Henke: You know my big takeaway here. It's not complex. It's not deeply scientific. But I'll just say it is so refreshing in nature when I see these things sometimes with flight that are just kind of awkward, you know?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, a little weird.
Marina Henke: These birds, they're just doing what makes sense to stay safe and to get where they need to go.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah exactly, they’re not thinking about them looking awkward. In fact, they probably think they look cool. Today we have got the magical, the awkward, and the pretty dang practical. We are doing another outside inbox roundup, and if you can't tell where this is heading, it is going to be all things with wings. We're talking birds and bugs, helicopters and dragons.
Marina Henke: Stay with us.
PRE-ROLL
Nate Hegyi: Hey, hey. This is Outside/In. I am Nate Hegyi, and I've got producer Marina Hankie here with me to bring us our listener questions about wings. Hey, Marina.
Marina Henke: Hello. Okay, so I want to start actually just straight into this first question, because I think it comes perfectly off the heels of this sandhill crane quandary. Okay, so Catherine from the Hudson Valley, she called in and she asked.
Catherine: There's wings in mammals and birds. Your butterfly wings and your wings. So many kinds of wings. I just, um, kind of want to know what the similarities and differences are in wings across the Animal kingdom.
Nate Hegyi: Here goes it.
Marina Henke: I want you to imagine a penguin, but with wings of a hummingbird. Doesn't something about that just seem wrong? What I'm getting at here is that it's fairly easy to intuit some big differences between wing types, but putting your finger or I guess feather on what those differences are is a bit harder. May I suggest you start with an open mind towards who exactly has wings in the first place?
Jonathan Rader: I mean, obviously I think people think of wings and they immediately think of birds and maybe bats.
Marina Henke: This is Jonathan Rader. He studies the physics of how animals fly at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Jonathan Rader: But it's not just animals. There are plants that have wings, too. Think of a maple seed. If you've ever seen a maple seed, they've got that wing that allows them to spiral down to the ground.
Marina Henke: Plants. Insects. Extinct dinosaurs. It's helpful to focus on what's similar. What do you need to be a wing?
Jonathan Rader: You have to have a broad, flat, maybe slightly curved surface that can catch the air.
Marina Henke: But once that air has been caught, flight looks all kinds of ways. A flying squirrel glides between treetops. A dandelion seed drifts through the air.
Jonathan Rader: And then we have powered fliers, things like birds and bats that are actually able to flap their wings and generate enough lift to keep themselves in the air as long as they want to stay in the air.
Marina Henke: Many of us have likely been in a different kind of powered flier before an airplane.
Jonathan Rader: It's kind of a continuum between just slowing down how fast you fall, and then basically being able to command your flight and go in the direction and gain altitude and go where you want to go.
Marina Henke: But not all organisms require the same thing to survive. How a creature needs to eat or reproduce or protect themselves. These strategies directly influence their wing shape. For example, let's compare two types of birds, the sparrow and the albatross.
Jonathan Rader: These two birds have completely different lifestyles and they fly in very different ways. The albatross is trying to spend as little energy as possible to cross an entire ocean.
Marina Henke: Some species of albatross can spend months or even years at sea, mostly coasting on the wind, rarely even flapping their wings.
Jonathan Rader: This is a seabird, and it's got these fantastically long, skinny wings. And so that long, skinny wing shape is really efficient for moving quickly in kind of a single direction. Not maneuvering very much, but staying in the air for as long as possible.
Marina Henke: Meanwhile, a sparrow needs to be much more agile, maybe jumping into the air to avoid a predator navigating around thick branches so their wings are shorter stubbier.
Jonathan Rader: And so these two different wing shapes are related intimately to the lifestyles of these two different birds.
Marina Henke: With insect's wings, diversify even more. That's because when you're really tiny, the viscosity of the air matters. Basically, it's harder to move through a fluid. And yes, air is a fluid.
Jonathan Rader: Because insects are so much smaller. They have to work relatively harder to move through the same air density.
Marina Henke: Slap the wings of a bald eagle onto a fruit fly, and you'll have a pretty unsuccessful fruit fly. But if you've spent an afternoon swatting away mosquitoes, you can tell me insects aren't unsuccessful fliers. Their wings just look different from birds. Take the thrip, a tiny bug less than a millimeter in size. Their wings look like dozens of tiny hairs. And when those filaments catch just enough air flight, like so many things in nature when it comes to wings, form follows function from a hummingbird beating its wings 70 times a second to a butterfly jetting diagonally against the wind. Us landlocked creatures get to delight in it all.
[MUX IN, Dognell, Blue Dot]
Nate Hegyi: Thank you. Marina. That was fascinating.
Marina Henke: Yeah, I am literally still thinking about those albatrosses. Can you imagine not walking on solid land for years?
Nate Hegyi: I mean, kind of sounds nice.
Marina Henke: Well, we clearly, relate differently to the open ocean.
Nate Hegyi: I just moved to a very oceany place, so I'm obsessed with the ocean right now.
Marina Henke: I do feel like I'm taking, like, maybe ten times too many digs at birds in this episode, but, um, videos of these albatrosses finally reaching land after years, right? They haven't stepped foot on land are so incredibly endearing and awkward. Again, I'm gonna have you just check out a video of one of these albatrosses making it to the land.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, I gotta watch this.
[CLIP, ALBATROSS WALKING]
Nate Hegyi: They kind of remind me of a toddler just figuring out how to walk. A little bit nervous. It's like, oh, how do I move my legs again?
Marina Henke: It's like a new kid. First day of school?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, they've definitely got, like, new kid, first day of school or, uh, very drunk person in New Orleans vibes, you know, just, like, kind of tottering around.
Marina Henke: We got the, we got the G and the PG 13 albatross.
Nate Hegyi: Exactly.
Marina Henke: But honestly, though, like, I do think just like it is such a feat of these birds that they can do that.
Nate Hegyi: It's actually like a perfect segue to the next question we got. This one comes from Chris in Juneau, Alaska.
Chris: I'm curious how have Wings in Nature inspired human flight? And also, are there examples where designs in nature have influenced the development of helicopters in particular? Thanks.
Marina Henke: Nate. You looked into this one, right? I did. All right. Let's hit it.
Nate Hegyi: So the short answer is abso freaking lutely. We copped a lot of our ideas for flight from animals.
Andrew Howley: From the earliest records that we have of humans trying to fly and become airborne. We know that they've looked to the design of the wings of other creatures.
Nate Hegyi: That's Andrew Howley. He's an editor at the Biomimicry Institute, a nonprofit.
Andrew Howley: So biomimicry is the practice of looking to the innovations that life itself has developed over the years and applying those same principles to human efforts.
Nate Hegyi: Humans have done this forever. More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci wrote extensively about the mechanics of bird and bat wings when he was sketching early designs for flying machines, and then later, at the turn of the 20th century, the Wright brothers looked at birds as well, which helped them achieve the first controlled, sustained flight. Of course, the big difference between bird wings and airplane wings is that.
Andrew Howley: Airplane wings are fixed and animal wings are always flexible in various ways. And so there's been some innovations to try to adapt that and use that.
Nate Hegyi: For instance, you know how the end of an airplane wing curves up. Well, these are called winglets. And they reduce drag, allowing a plane to soar more efficiently.
Andrew Howley: That's taking advantage of some of the vortices that form as the air swirls around differently above and below the wing. And we see that in the curvature of feathers, you know, like a soaring turkey vulture or something, you kind of see those wings curl up and that's that same kind of effect that we have on those little popped up sides of wings.
Nate Hegyi: The plane manufacturer Airbus recently developed winglets that actually move. They react and flex to wind gusts in the same way that a bird's wings do. And the name of that plane with these winglets. Albatross one. Now, our listener also asked about helicopters. They were inspired by these Chinese flying tops from 400 B.C., which spun when tossed into the air. So helicopters weren't directly inspired by anything in nature, though I should say that some of the flying tops do incorporate feathers. And Andrew explained that helicopters also share some physical principles with a certain tree seed.
Andrew Howley: You may be familiar with If the seeds of maple leaves as they fall, which people colloquially in the modern age will call helicopters at times. And that's something about the design and the shape of the wing that comes out from the seed. And it creates, you know, a pressure differential that causes it to spin and that slows its descent and kind of allows it more time to get carried farther from the parent tree.
Nate Hegyi: Andrew also told me that some of the most exciting modes of flight inspired by nature are still to come. For instance, as scientists look to create smaller and smaller drones, they're taking their cues from insects.
Andrew Howley: There's this amazing natural origami to the way that, you know, like an earwigs. Wings will just fold up and collapse very tightly and fit under the elytra, the hardened wing scales of the top of a beetle, and then just be able to deploy instantly very large, powerful wings. And so that's really helpful for making very tiny robots that we want to fly.
Nate Hegyi: This ability to fold wings could allow these cutting edge drones, known as micro air vehicles, to be extra compact when they aren't flying, just like a beetle.
[MUX IN. Overture, Epidemic]
Marina Henke: Big question are you an anxious flier?
Nate Hegyi: No, no, I am not. I watched a YouTube video about turbulence and it put me at ease. That's no joke. Like, literally, I was like, oh, okay. Mainly the reason they avoid turbulence is just to make us feel comfortable. You know, it's like. It's like driving on dirt roads. You're just going to hit some bumps along the way.
Marina Henke: Okay, so clearly I'm an incredibly nervous flier. Does it make you less or more nervous to get this information from your reporting that, like the pieces of machinery that you're in, are designed based off of a bird or an animal?
Nate Hegyi: Do you see birds falling from the sky all the time?
Marina Henke: No, but I see them all, like, um, they just look a little clunky, you know, our our, um, our sandhill crane friends.
Nate Hegyi: Listen, my 2 cents are. I think we should be a lot more nervous about driving than flying when it comes to accidents. Your chances of getting in a car crash are way higher than getting in a plane crash.
Marina Henke: Let me posit this have you ever seen an albatross driving a car? They don't do it.
Nate Hegyi: They don't do it. Exactly.
Marina Henke: All right. We're going to take a quick break. But before we do that, I did want to play a voicemail that we got from a listener recently. So Nate did an episode about GPS where we talked about how technology is sort of weakening our ability to figure out how to move through the world. So here is Elizabeth from Houston.
Elizabeth: My oldest daughter, who is now 20. When she was younger, my husband would tell her the roads that we were driving on, so she knew the area around our home.. Consequently, when she got her license, she said that amongst her group of friends, she was able to get her bearings and her friends were so impressed by it because they never knew the main thoroughfares or highways or anything. So I found myself with my younger daugh ter when I'm driving with her. I'll ask her. Okay, what freeway are we on? What exit are we taking? So that she can become familiar with the streets in the same way that her sister did? Great episode, I loved it.
Marina Henke: I love we like, get so many responses from this episode because I think everyone navigates through the world, right?
Nate Hegyi: Almost everybody uses GPS at this point too?
Marina Henke: We love getting listener feedback exactly like this. So please, please, please keep them coming. Uh, Nate, what, of course, is the phone number that people should send their thoughts to.
Nate Hegyi: Ooh, it's 1-844-GO-OTTER or or you can send us a voice memo at Outside.in. At nhpr.org. And I gotta say, the voice memos, when they're emailed, they're just, like, better quality. So email them.
Marina Henke: We love the voice memos. We'll be back in just a bit with more on things with wings. Stay with us.
MIDROLL
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi.
Marina Henke: And I'm Marina Hinkey. Before we keep cruising through some listener wings question, I'm going to have you indulge me in something. Nate. Okay.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Marina Henke: So I decided we're going to play a game. I've titled it bird, Bat or Bug. I'm going to play a sound of a wing, and you are going to guess what animal or insect that sound is coming from. Are you ready?
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Marina Henke: We got the first one coming up right now. Here we go.
[CLIP 1, Hercules Beetle]
Nate Hegyi: Oh, that's a lawnmower.
Marina Henke: I'm going to say the name of the game again. I'm going to say bird, bat or bug.
Nate Hegyi: Bird bat or bug. Uh, I'm gonna have to say bug. That's like so fast. Housefly.
Marina Henke: Housefly. Not close. And the answer is actually terrifying. It is a beetle that's the size of your hand.
Nate Hegyi: Whoa. Where's that beetle from?
Marina Henke: It's called the Hercules beetle.
Nate Hegyi: I saw one of those once in a zoo. They're pretty cool looking.
Marina Henke: Ah, I am not bothered by bugs, but that bug in that video, I actually can't keep watching. So, uh, you know what? We're gonna move on to the next one.
[CLIP, Grouse Drumming]
Nate Hegyi: Like, seriously, all of these sound like lawn mowers? Like, that was just lawn mower that you were, like, just trying to start, and you're like, come on, please turn over. Please turn over. Okay, it's running now, but, uh, that's got to be I'm gonna say that was a bird. And in fact, I'm going to say it was a big bird because it takes a lot of power to be able to go. Maybe. Maybe a big raven. That's my guess.
Marina Henke: Oh, big Raven, I love it. There's no wrong answers on this game. It is wrong. It is a grouse.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, interesting. Have you ever been spooked by a grouse? By the way.
Marina Henke: I have been. Maybe the scaredest I have ever been outdoors by grouse in Wisconsin as a teenager. Once. From them doing this exact thing.
Nate Hegyi: Whenever it happens, it feels way louder than that. It's just like poof! And you're just like, what was that?
Marina Henke: Yeah. So it's actually it's called a it's called grouse drumming and it's to attract a mate.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it's attract a mate. I always just thought it was like to like throw me off when I'm grouse hunting.
Marina Henke: It's their job. There is to to scare Nate in the woods.
Nate Hegyi: Exactly.
Marina Henke: Okay. Last one here. Last one. Uh, try to get specific here. Um, because I know you're going to have a gut instinct, and I want you to. I want you to push one step beyond it. Okay?
Nate Hegyi: Okay. Okay.
[CLIP, Bees Tooting]
Nate Hegyi: My gut instinct, obviously, is that's like a fly. But this game is called bird, bat and bug, right?
Marina Henke: Yes.
Nate Hegyi: Well, we've got a bug and we've got a bird. So it's got to be a bat, right, Marina?
Marina Henke: That would be an incredibly wise game maker that made that choice. That would be very logical. Again, no wrong answers. That is wrong.
Nate Hegyi: I don't know why you didn't put a bat in here.
Marina Henke: So that is, uh, specifically the noise of a queen bee. So not just a bee, not just the buzzing, but that little tooting noise. Yeah, it's officially called piping. Yeah. And it is a noise that queen bees make right when they've hatched. And it's to let the worker bees know. Hey you all, I'm a queen bee. I've hatched. You better not let any of these other growing queen bees hatch and try to run this colony. I'm in charge now.
Nate Hegyi: Wow. So it's like the trumpets trumpeting, you know, the arrival of your new queen. She is here. Long live the queen!
[MUX IN, Trumpet Fantasy, Epidemic]
Marina Henke: I picked this up, this last one, a little strategically about bees, because our next listener question is all about bees. We got this question from Andy in Dover, New Hampshire.
Andy: Hi Outside/In What happened to colony collapse with bees? It seemed like they were going extinct. And then it was no longer in the news. Was the problem solved?
Nate Hegyi: Our producer, Felix Poon, looked into this one.
Felix Poon: Roughly 20 years ago, something troubling started happening with honeybees.
Lauren Ponzio: Around 2006 and 2007, honeybee keepers started experiencing much higher winter honeybee losses than usual.
Felix Poon: This is Lauren Ponisio, an associate professor of biology at the University of Oregon specializing in the conservation of plant pollinators. And Lauren says it's perfectly normal for beekeepers to lose up to about 30% of their worker bees every winter. They run out of food. They get infected with diseases and parasites. But this was different.
Lauren Ponisio: They would leave the colony and then kind of disappear and not come back.
Felix Poon: It's called colony collapse disorder. When all the worker bees leave the hive for no apparent reason, leaving the queen to fend for herself, usually resulting in the death of the hive.
Lauren Ponisio: There really was no one specific cause. It was. It was a lot of interacting factors like pesticide use, like new diseases.
Felix Poon: But a big culprit was a parasite called the Varroa mite.
Lauren Ponisio: This little mite was like a little bee vampire, and it was causing a lot of colonies to get weaker and then get susceptible to a lot of other of these interacting stressors.
Felix Poon: Colony collapse disorder is a serious problem. We rely heavily on honeybees for industrial agriculture. They pollinate $15 billion of crops in the US every year, and some estimate about a third of the global human food supply. So the USDA developed techniques to help bees fend off mites and approved new antibiotics to address diseases. But according to recent national surveys, things have not gotten any better? If anything, they're getting worse. This year, annual honeybee losses are the highest they've ever been.
Lauren Ponisio: Around an average of 55%. And this is pretty, pretty astonishing. And unlike in previous years, the highest losses are in commercial hives. And usually it's the commercial hives that do really well because they have the most up to date management, the best technology. And so that's quite concerning. And additionally it's none of the usual suspects. So it's not just like higher mite numbers or something that we've seen in previous years that were associated with calling losses. So scientists really have no idea at this moment what caused those really high losses.
Felix Poon: Despite all this, Lauren doesn't think honeybees will go extinct. In fact, she and other experts say there are more honeybees today than there ever have been in the history of our planet. That's because they're really important to us essentially as livestock. So they're highly researched and managed. Native bees, though, are another story. There are two species of bumblebees that are on the endangered species list, and several other native bee species are being considered for the list. Not to mention, there's probably a lot of species we've already lost.
Lauren Ponisio: It's a very silent extinction because we don't have a lot of data about them.
Felix Poon: But Lauren says one thing we do know is native bees tend to pollinate some crops better than honeybees do, especially native North American species like blueberries and cranberries. Plus, native bees and honeybees can often interact with each other in beneficial ways.
Lauren Ponisio: So honeybees are actually more efficient pollinators often when when native bees are around.
Felix Poon: We manage honeybees on an industrial scale, but it's harder to do that with native bees. Most are what's known as solitary bees, meaning they don't live in hives, so you can't chuck them around in boxes and plop them into crop fields like farmers do with honeybees. Instead, to support native bees, Lauren says, we have to reduce pesticide use, and we have to make sure there's food around for them. Even when the crops that farmers want to pollinate aren't blooming.
Lauren Ponisio: To get them to pollinate agricultural systems. They need to be able to live there. They need to be able to survive. So we just need them to have some habitat.
[MUX IN, Cach PKL, Blue Dot]
Felix Poon: Like native hedgerows and cover crops. Good for the bees, for agriculture and for local ecosystems too.
Nate Hegyi: It's like one of those classic. At first it was overreported stories, and then because it was so overreported, we all just stopped reporting on it. But like the problem didn't go away.
Marina Henke: That's like such a good point. I even like was looking back at like when these news reports were coming out and it is it's all a couple years ago then kind of nothing.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. It was like literally editors just got tired of pitches about colony collapse.
Marina Henke: Mm. I gotta say, it was, like, incredibly drilled into me as a child that, like, bees equals colonies. Bees live in big families. And even just like hearing Felix go into this, I have never thought of like, oh, native bees solitary.
Nate Hegyi: Though I did always know that bumblebees were solitary. Or maybe I just assumed because I always just see them by themselves. And I always kind of think that they're lonely. I don't know why. Whenever I see a bumblebee, I'm like, oh, You're just a big, fluffy loner.
[MUX IN, Plataz, Blue Dot AND Bee SDX]
Marina Henke: Uh, Nate, are you ready for our last question?
Nate Hegyi: I am yes.
Marina Henke: I'm going to add that in a classic outside inbox fashion. This one, it's giving wings vibes rather than a wing content. Okay, and I need I need everyone, I need you, I need our listeners to run with it because, uh, we can always learn more about dragons.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, you had me at dragons. So this question comes from Grace via our Instagram.
Grace: Hello Outside/In. So winged or wingless, why do so many cultures around the world have dragon myths slash legends?
Marina Henke: Our producer Justine Paradee looked into it.
Justine Paradis: The dragon from the epic of Beowulf, the Aztec feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, Qinglong, and the many other divine Chinese dragons, and eventually Tolkien's Smaug. Why do humans dream up so many dragons?
Tim Burbery: I don't know if I can give a definitive answer, because there are so many different legends and so many different types of dragon stories.
Justine Paradis: Timothy Burberry is a professor of English at Marshall University in West Virginia. Tim offered a couple ways to approach this question of the dragon. There's psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud might say that the dragon tells us something about repressed ideas and the human subconscious.
Tim Burbery: Carl Jung and others talk about how a dragon is a good representation of a human right. We have this kind of worm like body that decays and gets old and so on. And yet we aspire to soar in the heavens. So there's this duality to our nature.
Justine Paradis: Tim isn't a psychologist or an archeologist. He thinks about the dragon mostly through the lens of geomythology, which is basically the idea that myths should be taken seriously because they could contain real insights into the planet's history. For example, the oral traditions of Indigenous Australians give an account of a 4000 year old meteor strike deep in the continent's interior. Sometimes this kind of oral history might improve scientific understanding, like in the case of the native Hawaiian legend of the goddess Pele. The stories are consistent with historical eruptions of the volcano Kilauea, but it took science a while to figure that out. And as one USGS volcanologist put it, quote, geologists were somewhat sidetracked by not taking the oral traditions into account.
Tim Burbery: People made some pretty good observations back in the day, whether it was a, you know, a weather event, a catastrophe, a Catastrophe or disaster, or it was some discovery that they made. They would come up with a story.
Justine Paradis: So what about dragon stories? Some geomorphologists contend that legends of mythical beings may have been influenced by fossils. When prehistoric people came upon the remains of extinct animals, like dinosaurs or wooly mammoths.
Tim Burbery: Skulls, antlers, sometimes entire skeletons, the teeth. They didn't know exactly what they were, but they came up with some creative explanations.
Justine Paradis: Consider the Cyclops, a mythical giant, one eyed man associated with the island of Sicily. Some argue that the Cyclops might have been a way of explaining the huge skulls with a hole in their center discovered on the island, skulls that we now know to be ancient. Elephant skulls with a hole for the trunk.
Tim Burbery: There are stories of one eyed monsters or three eyed monsters, some kind of variation around the world, but a lot of those sort of classic Cyclops stories do seem to have arisen right in the areas where we find those particular bones.
Justine Paradis: Meanwhile, some theorize that the skulls of extinct giraffes discovered in the Shivalik Hills of India were once identified as the skulls of dragons. But Tim says geomythology is not a science. Beings like dragons could have been influenced by fossils in the area. Or maybe the idea of the dragon already existed, and then the discovery of fossils appeared to confirm it. Or maybe the fossils have nothing to do with it at all. The idea does have its critics. In fact, a couple paleontologists recently examined one of the most famous theories. A potential link between the fossils of a horned dinosaur called Protoceratops and the mythical Griffon, a half lion half eagle. The authors found the connection unconvincing and superficial. But Tim thinks it's quite possible that it's more than just coincidence. The debate is ongoing.
Tim Burbery: I don't know if there's a myth out there that's just completely made up from completely whole cloth. You know, there's got to be some foundation to it after all.
Justine Paradis: Even if they're not influenced by fossils, dragon stories come from somewhere and from someone.
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Nate Hegyi: Okay, here's my guess. I think it was pterodactyls. That's got to be right. Pterodactyls are pretty much freaking dragons.
Marina Henke: That's true, because they're the ones that fly.
Nate Hegyi: Exactly the fossils of pterodactyls. If I stumbled across that 3000 years ago, I would have been like, That's Dragon.
Marina Henke: I like that. I think you're on to something. We should. We should call back this guy, and you should let him know you've cracked the case.
Nate Hegyi: I've cracked the case, Tim. Don't worry about it. We don't need to do any research into that. I think I've got a pretty good handle on this one.
Marina Henke: Are there are there any dragon characters that, like, loom very large for you in childhood?
Nate Hegyi: Nate Smith, which I always thought was actually pronounced smog. But we all know that I'm a really bad pronouncer of things, so.
Marina Henke: Don't say that about yourself. Hey. Well, my full transparency embarrassing moment is that my childhood, um, school mascot? It was a griffin. Uh, and until about college, I totally thought Griffins were real.
Nate Hegyi: I mean, griffins are real. There's a lot of griffins out there. They just happen to be dudes named Griffin.
Marina Henke: That is like the most dad joke that maybe you've ever made on the show.
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Nate Hegyi: I know, I know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Everybody. That is a wrap on our wing. Questions.
Marina Henke: As always, we love our outside inbox time. Truly, it is joyful. It is fun. It is goofy. And they happen because of you all. Yes. Do you want to announce the the next callout?
Nate Hegyi: Absolutely. So for our next callout, we are looking for questions about healing. Now this could be healing in humans or in the natural world. So far we've gotten questions on why certain animals can regrow limbs, why we pick scabs, and whether crystals really work. You can send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and then emailing that to us at outside.in at nhpr.org. Or you can give a call to our hotline. We are at 1844 Go Otter.
Marina Henke: I'm so excited about my question. I'm not going to give it away to everyone, but it's a it's a question that relates to love and heartbreak. Get ready for it everybody.
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: This episode was recorded, produced, and mixed by Marina Henke, Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and me, Nate Hegyi, your host. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of on demand audio.
Marina Henke: Music from Blue Dot Sessions, Cercles Nouvelles, and Dozeoff.
Nate Hegyi: Outside in is a production of NPR.