The Last Dragon (2004 film)

Did You Know?

• The Chinese forest dragon is depicted as able to camouflage itself in dappled forest light.
• The mountain dragon has four legs and fully-functional wings.

Plot summary

The docufiction interweaves two stories. Jack Tanner, an American paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, proposes that a carbonised Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on display was killed by a prehistoric dragon, a theory that ruins his reputation. A flashback shows the Tyrannosaurus battling a female dragon in the Cretaceous; the dragon dies from her wounds, and her son survives by learning to fly, aided by hydrogen-producing bacteria that provide buoyancy. Later, the adult dragon attempts to mate and defeats a dominant male in an aerial duel. The museum is contacted by Romanians who have discovered a dragon corpse in the Carpathian Mountains alongside carbonised 15th-century human bodies. Tanner and two colleagues examine the corpse in a warehouse, finding that despite weighing 900 lb, the creature could fly and breathe fire using stored bacteria and hydrogen. The prehistoric dragon perished in the K-T Event, but its marine cousin survived in the ocean and evolved into species such as the Chinese forest dragon, which glides and camouflages in forest light, and the mountain dragon, a four-legged, winged inhabitant of the Carpathian and Atlas mountains.