Dragon Scales

The wife and I were watching a History Channel program about gods and monsters and various myths. It's more or less understood that (sadly) there is no evidence that dragons ever existed, but the notion of them likely comes from ancient peoples seeing partial dinosaur skeletons and making up the rest.

It got me to thinking 'wings and tails have some of the smallest; therefore, hardest to find preserved bones'. So how do we know for certain that dragons weren't some breed of flying dinosaur? We know that there were all shapes and sizes of dinosaurs, we know some pteradons had wingspans of up to 65 feet, and we know that many of the great lizards had bird-like anatomy.We like to think we know lots of stuff...until new evidence is found to change or utterly refute what we held so dear.

All this made me wonder just how big a dragon could get and still get off the ground. So I did me some Googling and Wiki-ing about dinosaurs and wingspans and what have you. This is what I came up with:

In one of many worlds that I have built I had an idea that jungle tribes of gnomes/halflings used to worship and ride dragons. However, as mounts the dragons could only get so large before the tiny riders could no longer control them. Below are the notes I dug out on the matter.

Category	Age in years	Size
Wyrmling	0-5	Tiny
Very Young	6-15	Small
Youngling	16-25	Medium
Juvenile	26-50	Medium
Young Adult	51-100	Large
Adult	100-200	Large
Mature Adult	200-400	Huge
Old	400-600	Huge
Very Old	600-800	Huge
Ancient	800-1000	Huge
Wyrm	1000-1200	Gargantuan
Great Wyrm	1200-1500	Gargantuan
Colossal Wyrm	1500+	Colossal

Since Halflings never break 4 feet tall they are perpetually considered Small. This means that they cannot ride anything bigger than a Large dragon, also meaning that dragons only bear riders until age 200. After this it is both difficult to accept “agedness” since a normal dragon life is only about one quarter over and to go into retirement from the Halfling family that a dragon has served with for 3-4 generations. Flying with a rider is considered only a station for youthful dragons.