I like to watch people play dungeons and dragons (or dnd, if you prefer). And, for a time, I played a mock campaign to help a gamemaster friend. While I don’t play much anymore, I’m still fond of the builds from my previous game.
I work hard to include real-world animals and technology in my stories, but I also wanted to keep my fantastical dnd characters alive in my writing. I had a conundrum.
One of my favorite companions from a previous dnd game is the pseudodragon. There aren’t a lot of details on the official description sheet for this creature, but there are definitely some notable traits.
Let’s see: “resistance to magic” and “telepathy”? Yeah. Definitely more fantasy than science. But, excellent sight, hearing, and smell are common animal characteristics. Plus, “blindsight”, “darkvision”, and high passive perception are not exactly otherworldly. A flying animal with these traits? Sounds a bit like a bat …right?
Time for a closer look.
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Basic Bat Facts
Let’s begin with some general facts about bats. Bats are mammals.
For those who need a refresher on what a mammal is: among other things, being a mammal means that bats have:
Hair
Regulated body temperature
The ability to give birth to live young
The ability to nurse their offspring.
What are mammals not known for? The ability to fly. Bats are, in fact, the only mammal that can fly. (Ahem, without being aided by technology.)
In the category of fliers, bats are special due to the biology behind bat flight. Unlike birds, whose flight muscles are attached to the ribcage, bats control wing movement via muscles attached to the shoulder blades. This feature, along with other aspects of bat-body design, result in increased agility and the ability to hunt and eat insects while in flight.
Similarities between Pseudodragons and Mexican Free-Tailed Bats
Okay. So, we have a start.
True, dragons are commonly shown as hatching eggs to reproduce, so they’re not mammals. But when it comes to dragon physiology, wings are usually depicted as having a musculature that is much more like a human hand than a bird wing. This is similar to bat wings, which are also much like a human arm.
Additionally, pseudodragons are above-average fliers. While some bats are not particularly speedy, the Mexican free-tailed bat is the fastest flier in the animal kingdom. This fast flight is due, in part, to its “free tail,” which, unlike most bat tails, extends past the tail membrane. The aerodynamics of the Mexican free-tailed bat are aided by the reduced tail membrane. And the reduced membrane gives the appearance of a long tail, much like what the pseudodragon has.
For bonus points in my comparison, I point to the preferred environments of the pseudodragon overlapping with some of the preferred biomes of the Mexican free-tailed bat (namely rocky areas, urban environments, and forests).
…Sounds like I found the focus of my sci-fi characterization: the Mexican free-tailed bat. Not exactly a Mexican bat, this bat is also called the Brazilian free-tailed bat, as referenced by its scientific name, Tadarida brasiliensis.
How Perceptive is a Bat?
The final grouping of real-world descriptions given to the pseudodragon relates to its senses. To recap, pseudodragons have great sight in both light and dark. Plus their sense of hearing and smell are excellent.
This is the point in my research when the Mexican free-tailed bat became really interesting.
For starters, any Google search will tell you that bats are not blind. In fact they have decent vision in both light and dark; they just don’t rely on this sense as much as other animals do.
Hearing and smell are this bat’s most useful perception traits.
The use of reflected sound to detect the location of objects, aka echolocation, gives bats a useful approach to navigation and hunting. Being able to locate objects in three-dimensional space while flying at 160 kph / 100 mph is well beyond what is likely to be meant by “high passive perception” in dnd.
Similarly, imagine you were a looking for someone you knew in a crowded building. And when I say crowded, I mean hundreds of people wall to wall. Now, imagine your only means of finding that someone was by listening for their call and sniffing for their scent. Mexican free-tailed bat do this every day to nurse their offspring.
Bat caves become crowded very quickly, so mothers leave their pups to live in a cave together while they’re growing. Though a mother leaves her pup to socialize and mature in an area separate from the adult bat roost, she still needs to feed her offspring, so she pushes through the packed nursery to find and nurse her only child. That’s no ordinary sense of hearing and smell.
Are Mexican Free-Tailed Bats Just Like Pseudodragons?
Granted, these two creatures are not a perfect match, but I think this bat will do well in paying homage to one of my favorite characters. I mean, three out of four isn’t bad.
| Pseudodragon | Mexican/Brazilian Free-Tailed Bat |
Mammal | X | ✓ |
Fast Flier | ✓ | ✓ |
Free Tail | ✓ | ✓ |
High Perception | ✓ | ✓ |
Until next time, stay curious.
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