Metazoica

(The cover of said book) I am sick in bed today, and so I thought I would dust off a few of my speculative zoology tomes and read them. One of the books I picked out was Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons . Yes, despite what one might think, speculative biology isn't just about aliens, alternate timelines, and future beasts. Essentially, speculative biology encompasses a wide variety of topics, but all share one common thread; they attempt to document and explain the natural history of fantastic creatures through science (for the sake of this discussion, I lump in heavily defined magic in with science). However, this was not the case with Dragonology . It is so irritating how much it screwed up. I only had to turn to the first page to see them screw it up. On the very first page, the book attempts to describe the evolution of dragons. Unfortunately, it does it incredibly poorly. For example, they claim that a "four-legged dragon with wings" can evolve through Darwi...