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Ancalagon the Black – RivkaZ 2014

Part kite, part vulture, part gliding snake, part colugo, part dirigible, all nightmare. 

Waah, I wish I had more creature design practice! x_x With many more hours of skeleton and musculature studies I might have been able to make this guy look more convincing… but in the meantime hey, it’s a dragon! 

So keeping in mind that aerodynamics and biology are not exactly my areas of expertise, here are my headcanons for Ancalagon:

• He’s the largest of Melkor’s dragons, whose body is large enough that when it falls on the peaks of Thangorodrim, it breaks them, and he also flies. My guess is that this is not a critter built for anything else other than flying.
• He is mostly membrane; lots of wing and sail fins. His bones are porous like a bird’s. His ribs flatten out when he flies (like those gliding snakes).
• HYDROGEN SACKS. In addition to huge-ass wings, Ancalagon is buoyed up by several large sacks of flammable, lighter-than-air gas. He also jets and ignites it from glands in his mouth, making  lovely blue fireballs. 
• Despite all the wingspan, he is a glider. He does not have much musculature to flap with. Or crawl with, for that matter. He is a one-way-flight dragon; he launches himself off the highest peak of the Iron Mountains, uses volcanic thermals and fire to get lift, and then just steers. If he lands or falls somewhere he can’t jump off, he’s about as useless as a fruit bat on the ground. 
• Ancalagon has iridescent black hide, but he is so lightly built that you can see his blood vessels and organs through his skin. This gives him a reddish glow when he’s in daylight. 
• Big googly lemur eyes, filled with spooky, soul-stealing malice; the better to see you with.
• Like the fell beasts used by the Nazgul, he’s got some sonic weaponry that’s inadvisable to be in close range of. 
• There are many flaws in his design. He’s not Melkor’s most adaptable babu; he probably wouldn’t survive on his own for very long. Basically, he’s a big creepy fire-bomber and intimidation tool. When he’s killed by unexpected-flying-Valar-ship-canonfire or whatever, he falls right on top of Angband like 100 tons of wet tissue paper, and it is no fun for anybody.