"I have
seen them, at night, flapping their mighty wings across the moon. They call to
me, tell me I will join them soon. Herr Doktor Leberknoedel says that I am
crazy, but I know that its not true... They will carry me off to my new home,
and we will dance round the moon together... Oh yes."
—Rudi,
Great Altdorf Asylum Inmate.
Terrorgheist are the largest and most ferocious bat species
to have ever existed, so large and terrifying that they've grown to the size of
Dragons.
In the hidden reaches of Sylvania, these titanic bats soar
out from their caves to hunt horses, caravans and pegasi under the sickly
skies. It is the ambush tactic of the creatures that give them their truly
terrifying reputation. A Terrorgheist's vision is poor, so the swooping
monstrosity ensures that its prey is rendered motionless by emitting a piercing
shriek so loud and unexpected it can stun even a Bretonnian warhorse into
paralysis. At that precise moment, the Terrorgheist will dive down, gather up
rider and mount in its talons, and return to its lair to glut itself on the
warm blood of its victims.
It is the mortal remains of these troglodytic beasts that
the Ghoul Kings of the caverns bind to their service. The binding process comes
easily to these reclusive Vampires, for Strigoi Ghoul Kings and Terrorgheists
have much in common. As Dark Magic swirls around the monstrous cave-creature, a
bond of blood is formed between master and beast. Much like any other creature
that drinks from a Ghoul King's veins, Terrorgheists have necromantic power
running in their blood that can heal even the most severe of wounds.
In death, a Terrorgheist becomes a nightmare made real.
Guided by its master's will, the monstrosity creaks through the clouds above
the battlefield on blotch-skinned pinions, its rotten flesh and withered organs
open to the night air. It is the deathly shriek of an unliving Terrorgheist
that is perhaps its most fearsome aspect. As the magics of undeath are worked
upon the beast, its cry is transformed from a simple but shockingly loud noise
into a barrage of eldritch power. Some say the Terrorgheist's shriek is nothing
less than the screams of the damned, channelled directly from the Realm of
Chaos. It matters little to the Terrorgheist's prey, for so devastating is its
sonic attack that it can cause a man to die of fright in an instant. By venting
this noise as it dives down upon its prey, a Terrorgheist can cripple an enemy
regiment moments before it slams into the reeling survivors, slaughtering the
rest with disease ridden tooth and claw. Even when the Terrorgheist is slain,
these creatures have a violent tendency to explode upon their deaths. Due to
their ferocity, Terrorgheist are a highly favourable mount amongst many Undead
factions.
The legendary tarrasque is possibly the most dreaded monster
of the Material Plane. It is widely believed that only one of these creatures
exists, though no one can predict where and when it will strike.
A scaly biped, the tarrasque is fifty feet tall and seventy
feet long, weighing hundreds of tons. It carries itself like a bird of prey,
leaning forward and using its powerful lashing tail for balance. Its cavernous
maw yawns wide enough to swallow all but the largest creatures, and so great is
its hunger that it can devour the populations of whole towns.
Legendary Destruction.
The destructive potential of the tarrasque is so vast that
some cultures incorporate the monster into religious doctrine, weaving its
sporadic appearance into stories of divine judgment and wrath. Legends tell how
the tarrasque slumbers in its secret lair beneath the earth, remaining in a
dormant state for decades or centuries. When it awakens in answer to some
inscrutable cosmic call, it rises from the depths to obliterate everything in
its path.
Damage Immunities fire, poison; bludgeoning,
piercing, and
Legendary Resistance. If the tarrasque fails a saving throw,
it can choose to succeed instead. Magic Resistance. The tarrasque has advantage
on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.
Reflective Carapace.
Any time the tarrasque is targeted by a magic missile spell,
a line spell, or a spell that requires a ranged attack. Sometimes the tarrasque
is unaffected. On a 6, the tarrasque is unaffected, and the effect is reflected
back at the caster as though it originated from the tarrasque, turning the
caster into the target.
Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: one target. Hit: slashing
damage. Horns. Melee Weapon Attack: reach 10ft., one target. Hit: piercing
damage. Tail. Melee Weapon Attack: reach 20ft., one target. Hit: bludgeoning
damage. If the target is a creature, it must keep its balance or be knocked
prone.
Multiattack.
The tarrasque can use its Frightful Presence. It then makes
five attacks: one with its bite, two with its claws, one with its horns, and
one with its tail. It can use its Swallow instead of its bite.
Bite.
Melee Weapon Attack: one target. Hit piercing damage. If the
target is a creature, it is grappled. Until this grapple ends, the target is
restrained, and the tarrasque can't bite another target.
Siege Monster.
The tarrasque deals huge damage to objects and structures.
Frightful Presence.
Each creature of the tarrasque's choice within 120 feet of
it and aware of it must succeed in resisting its presence or become frightened
for 1 minute. A creature can try to resist, with disadvantage if the tarrasque
is within line of sight, ending the effect on itself on a success. If a
creature is successful or the effect ends for it, the creature is immune to the
tarrasque's Frightful Presence for the next 24 hours.
Swallow.
The tarrasque makes one bite attack against a Large or
smaller creature it is grappling. If the attack hits, the target takes the
bite's damage, the target is swallowed, and the grapple ends. While swallowed,
the creature is blinded and restrained, it has total cover against attacks and
other effects outside the tarrasque, and it takes acid damage. If the tarrasque
takes a large strike or more from a creature inside it, the tarrasque must try
to hold it in or regurgitate all swallowed creatures, which fall prone in a
space within 10 feet of the tarrasque. If the tarrasque dies, a swallowed
creature is no longer restrained by it and can escape from the corpse by using
30 feet of movement, exiting prone.
LEGENDARY ACTIONS
The tarrasque can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from
the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time. The
tarrasque regains spent legendary actions after some time. Attack. The
tarrasque makes one claw attack or tail attack. Move. The tarrasque
moves up to half its speed. Chomp (Costs 2 Actions). The tarrasque makes
one bite attack or uses its Swallow.
It must be hard keeping cool when you're the size of a semitrailer – imagine finding some shade or a hat big enough.
So how did sauropod dinosaurs prevent heat stroke back in the late Jurassic, and keep their brains from overheating?
New research, published today in the journal The Anatomical Record, suggests that gigantic dinosaurs, including the Tyrannosaurus rex, evolved systems to cool their blood on its way to their brains.
But, in what was a surprise to the researchers, many of these dinosaur groups came up with slightly different ways to do so.
It's getting hot in here
There's long been a debate about whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded like reptiles (ectotherms) or warm-blooded like bird and mammals (endotherms), said study co-author and palaeontologist Larry Witmer of Ohio University.
But if you're gigantic, this becomes a bit of a moot point when it comes to overheating.
"One thing that became obvious to us was that regardless of their physiology, huge dinosaurs were going to be hot, they couldn't help it," Professor Witmer said.
"They had really enormous volumes but relatively low surface areas, which means once they heated up, it would be hard for them to cool down in the absence of special mechanisms."
That posed a problem, because their brains (like ours), eyes and other sense organs were very sensitive to temperature.
If they got too hot, basic functions the brainstem controls, such as blood pressure and heart rate, would become compromised, Professor Witmer said.
A bad case of heat stroke could potentially be fatal.
The kicker was hot blood heated up in their body's core was being pumped to their brain.
For sauropods it wasn't only the warm climate in which they lived that was to blame.
"Not only were they baking in the sun, but the huge fermentation vat of their gastrointestinal tract was also generating significant heat," Professor Witmer said.
The solutions that these huge dinosaurs evolved were all based on the principle of evaporative cooling, which is the way we keep ourselves cool.
"Sweat emerges as a liquid onto the hot surface of our skin, and the heat causes the liquid to turn into a vapour (that is, the sweat evaporates)," Professor Witmer said.
The evaporating sweat takes the heat energy with it, leaving the surface cooler.
"This same process works in the nose and mouth of a person or a dog or a dinosaur – wherever there's moisture," he said.
"When the surface you're cooling happens to be richly supplied with blood, that blood will also be cooled.
"What we were able to show was that a lot of that cooled blood went back to the region of the brain."
By first looking at modern-day birds and reptiles, the researchers were able to trace patterns of blood flow from these cooling sites to the brain.
"The handy thing about blood vessels is that they basically write their presence into the bones," said palaeontologist and lead author of the study Ruger Porter of Ohio University.
"The bony canals and grooves that we see in modern-day birds and reptiles are our link to the dinosaur fossils," Dr Porter said.
By looking for similar canals and grooves in dinosaur skulls the scientists were able to reconstruct their blood flow patterns.
The idea behind the paper is a good one, said Roger Seymour, Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the study.
Professor Seymour said as far as he knows, he was the first person to look at skeletal material to see if they showed anything about the circulatory system.
"For animals that have gone extinct all we have to guide us in the circulatory system are bones," he said.
"You can judge the size of the openings in the skull as they've done and make inferences about how much blood went through."
Infographic of a diplodocus head showing blood vessels in the nose and mouth that it used to cool its brain
Sauropods may have walked around with their mouths open to help keep their brains cool.
What the research team found was multiple ways the huge dinosaurs had evolved of keeping a cool head.
Ankylosaurs had increased blood flow to their nose, beyond what was needed to provide nutrition to their tissues, turning this into a cooling region.
Whereas sauropods had increased blood flow to both their nose and mouth.
"Sauropods almost certainly didn't pant like dogs," Professor Witmer said.
"But we're suggesting our evidence shows that they may have routinely walked around with their mouths open when they were overheated."
Computer generation graphic illustrating the different sinuses of therapod dinosaurs and how that contributed to cooling
Theropod like T-rex used their jaw like an old-fashioned bellows pump to cool their blood on its way to their brain.
Theropods, like T-rex, were different again.
Instead of increasing the blood flow to their nose or mouth or eyes, they increased the blood supply to an enlarged air sinus off to the side of their nasal cavity in their snouts.
We have similar air sinuses, Professor Witmer said, that get clogged when we have a cold.
"What makes theropods – including living theropods (birds) – different from us is that the air was pumped in and out of the sinus, like an old-fashioned bellows pump, by jaw movements," he said.
And that airflow set up a good evaporative cooling system.
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The research is interesting because it's finally given us quite a bit of quantitative data on how huge dinosaurs deal with overheating and the risks it poses to their brains, said palaeobiology PhD student Douglass Rovinsky who was not involved in the study.
"At a certain point you get so big that mathematically you shouldn't be alive," Mr Rovinsky of Monash University said.
"This shows that they changed the arrangement of their blood vessels to keep from cooking alive."
Mr Rovinsky said it would be interesting to see if this study prompts bird researchers to understand how they cope with heat better too.
The researchers are now keen to expand their analysis to other groups of dinosaurs, including one closer to home, Muttaburrasaurus.
Famous prototypical dragons include the
mušḫuššu of ancient Mesopotamia, Apep in Egyptian mythology, Vṛtra in
the Rigveda, the Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible, Python, Ladon, Wyvern,
and the Lernaean Hydra in Greek mythology, Jörmungandr, NÃðhöggr, and Fafnir in Norse mythology, and the dragon from Beowulf.
They traditionally symbolize potent and auspicious
powers, particularly control over water, rainfall, typhoons, and
floods. The dragon is also a symbol of power, strength, and good luck
for people who are worthy of it in East Asian culture.
Ancient people may have discovered dinosaur
fossils and understandably misinterpreted them as the remains of
dragons. Chang Qu, a Chinese historian from the 4th century B.C., mislabeled such a fossil in what is now Sichuan Province.
Storm dragons (or storm wyrms) are dragonkin native to
Skywall. Harnessing the elemental powers of the storm, these majestic beasts
crackle like lightning and roar like thunder.
The mighty storm dragons are mysterious creatures that
inhabit Skywall, the portion of the Elemental Plane that serves as the domain
of air elementals. Their origin is unknown, as before the Shattering no one had
seen them (or lived long enough to tell the story). Their draconic appearance
however may not indicate their true nature. It appears they are quite tightly
connected to the element of air, and serve Al'Akir, mostly found in Vortex
Pinnacle. They also seem to be non-sentinent beings, as none of them so far can
be seen using any kind of language, neither draconic nor kalimag, not even
Auran. This may mean that they are in fact elementals similar to the phoenixes
from the Firelands.
Brann Bronzebeard recently uncovered evidence, corroborated
by reports from adventurers in Deepholm, that proto-dragons and dragons may
have origins in these — and other — elemental drakes. The inhabitants of
Deepholm, the Skywall, the Firelands, and the Abyssal Maw are less than
talkative on these matters, however, and most of them were not around when the
elemental prisons were created.
Swedish
science journalist Torill Kornfeldt travelled the world researching
"de-extinction" science for her book The Re-Origin Of Species.
She
says Jurassic Park showed what the process is supposed to look like:
scientists find an ancient mosquito trapped in amber, draw dinosaur
blood from the perfectly preserved specimen, then use that DNA to clone
the extinct reptile.
Except researchers have tried this and it doesn't work.
"They
don't find any dinosaur DNA, they don't find any mosquito DNA either,"
says Kornfeldt, explaining that even well-preserved DNA degrades over
time.
A mammoth task
So dinosaurs are probably out (as are
Jurassic-era mosquitos) but what about something that died out a little
more recently, like the woolly mammoth?
"The woolly mammoth is tricky," Kornfeldt says, predicting we could see a live mammoth in "either 15 years, or never".
"That research is still depending on a few scientific breakthroughs that haven't happened yet — but still might."
Even if those breakthroughs happen, the creature the scientists create won't be a cloned mammoth.
Cloning is only possible where there are tissue samples from a live animal, or "very recently dead" one.
Woolly mammoths have been extinct for thousands of years, so while there's still DNA in them, "it's really degraded".
Scientists can piece that DNA together in a computer by comparing it to a living relative, such as the Asian elephant.
"Kind
of like looking at the lid when you do a jigsaw puzzle, you look at all
the pieces and see where they're supposed to go," Kornfeldt says.
The next step is to identify the genetic differences between the
elephant and the mammoth — genes that govern the animal's fur, for
example — and then tweak the elephant's genes to make it more like a
mammoth.
"You're basically mammothifying an elephant," Kornfeldt says.
Home sweet home
Once you have a herd of woolly mammoths, the next problem is where to put them.
Kornfeldt travelled to Siberia, where researchers are attempting to recreate a woolly-mammoth era habitat.
"This was a very rich ecosystem — in some ways it was comparable to the African savanna," she says.
"There
were loads of animals on this grassland, and then when the Ice Age
ended — and when humans came in — this ecosystem changed.
"A lot of animals, including the mammoth, disappeared ... and the grassland was replaced by forest," Kornfeldt says.
Without access to a live woolly mammoth, the researchers have wheeled in an unlikely substitute.
"They have this old, Soviet-era tank that they drive around and knock down trees with," Kornfeldt says.
"One of the functions of a mammoth, same as elephants, is to knock down trees so the grass has somewhere to go."
A genetic moonshot
Even if creating a woolly-mammoth-like creature were a possibility, why would we bother?
In
selling the USA's original 1969 moonshot to the public, John F Kennedy
famously talked up the benefits of taking on a massive challenge:
"We
choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will
serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills."
Kornfeldt says cloning the woolly mammoth could have similar benefits to the Apollo program.
"We
didn't go to the Moon to collect gold or something, we did it just to
go through the process — and in the same way, going through the process
of figuring something like this out has a great value in itself," she
says.
"It makes the researchers a lot more aware of how different
genes work and what their functions are, what kind of genes you can
change and what genes you can't change, and how it all sort of fits
together."
