The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.
hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole
This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.
(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)
But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.
For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.
Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?
A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.
Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.
this is some good dragon discourse right here, 10/10, and i dont mean to derail the whole thing away from the eyes, but i feel obligated to mention that in many stories and accurate to some reptiles, dragons have an extremely acute sense of smell/taste which would definitely help narrow down the depth perception issue. things smell stronger the closer they are. and i feel like i read somewhere that a blind snake can flick the air with its tongue and track its target mouse with no trouble at all. gotta imagine the “great serpents of the sky” had some pretty advanced biology. enough to make field of view win out against depth perception.
anywho. cool stuff. fear the dragons even if they are the prey cause they still beat us on the food chain.
when I try to hear this in my head my mental voice is incapable of pronouncing it fast enough to fit the timing of the line
“noooo oooone… adjksjfksfjslenry like Gaston!”
and when I try to fit it to one of the longer such lines, my mental voice becomes too confused about conflicting scansion to continue
no one’s droll like gaston no one’s swole like gaston no one fits his assigned gender role like gaston
I’m especially fond of the paaaatriaaarchy
My what a guy that gastooon
Bless you for making it scan
NOW I CAN’T READ IT WITHOUT SINGING IN MY HEAD
No one’s droll like Gaston, No one’s swole like Gaston, No one fits his assigned gender role like Gaston! For there’s no one online half as phony, His tinder’s got dick pics to spare, You can ask any neckbeard or brony They’ll show you (no homo) whose trilby they’d wear! No one drawls like Gaston Or catcalls like Gaston, Or manspreads on the train in a sprawl like Gaston! I’m especially fond of the paaaatriaaarchy! My what a guy that Gastooon!
I legit wrote up a whole thing about dwarf beards and the different types of braids (they have three distinct genders and some smaller variations of non-trinary genders that are less common but still recognized) and how the braids indicate like a whole host of things beyond gender including marital status, preferences of partner, and whether or not they wish to raise children with a potential mate, and it was awesome but then something happened and i lost it and i will be forever sad.
Conversely, elves did not know what A Gender fucking was until they met humans. They only have one pronoun, and it causes a lot of confusion to outsiders. This is why it’s hard to tell the difference between male and female elves – they don’t give a shit about separating the two.
This is so so cool. I love elves just, , not knowing what a gender is.
humans, meeting elves for the first time: are you… man or woman?
elf: i am elf?
human: no i mean what gender are you
elf: *gesturing wildly to themselves* elf???? ELF??
Yeah, this is what the D&D party thinks they’re gonna be like, and then they show up and it’s all screaming and rolling 1s and the gnome’s on fire and the druid is making sarcastic remarks while the paladin disarms traps with his head.
The fun thing about speculative biology is that there isn’t really an upper limit. It can always get even more horrifying.
Here, I’ll give you an example: you know how in Pokémon lore, Cubone allegedly wears its mother’s skull as a hat?
Some believe that this means Cubones have a fixed and dwindling population, because there’s necessarily at most one offspring per mother.
In fact, no such population limit exists, because Marowak – the adult form of Cubone – possesses a sacrificial “head”. A Marowak’s brain is located in a reinforced compartment within the thoracic cavity; what appears to be the head is actually a limb containing only a simple sensory ganglion, as well as the usual sense organs. The female Marowak sheds this limb shortly after its offspring hatches in order to provide a food source and protective shell for its young. The limb then regrows in a matter of weeks; during this time, the “headless” Marowak is blind and deaf, and must be cared for by its mate.
I invite my closest friends and family to a gender reveal party, but when I open the box with maniacal flourish instead of pink or blue balloons, a television screen is revealed.
I dim the lights remotely as we hear Cate Blanchett say, “The world is changed. I feel it in the water.”
thisacelovesheadcanons 