Crafty Ginger

When you see an animal with its eyes set to the front, like wolves, or humans, that’s usually a predator animal.

If you see an animal with its eyes set farther back, though—to the side—that animal is prey.

Now look at this dragon.

See those eyes?

They’re to the SIDE.

This raises an interesting—and terrifying—question.

What in the name of Lovecraft led evolution to consider DRAGONS…

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.

The main thing everyone seems to be talking about here is where the eyes are positioned on the head, not how the eye is set in the socket, which is very important! Absolutely every single one of those dragons presented in drawings have forward facing eyes to some degree.

To be my visual aid, we’re going to use my good friend, the Tyrannosaurus Rex!

(hello everyone pleasure to be here)

Now the first thing you’ll notice here is the fact that our good pal T. Rex’s eyes are oriented a great deal like all the dragons eyes in the artwork above! But that absolutely does not mean this creature had sideways facing eyes, or lacked binocular vision. In fact, T. Rex is famous for having a SUPERB field of binocular vision. How, you ask?

Because despite being set in a way that looks rather sideways when viewed in profile, the eyes of the T. rex actually face forward together, and create an overlapping field of view. The same can be said for all of the dragons above, despite not having their eyes as close together as say, a wolf, they are still ABSOLUTELY oriented for this type of vision.

So lets take a look at one of the more famous dragons depicted in this post, Mr. Smaug. (And the one with readily available alternative poses.)

(yes greetings, pleasure to be here as well)

So, here he is, what do we do if we turn him from profile view, to a full front on…?

Boom.

Smaug ABSOLUTELY has some form of binocular vision from the way his eyes are positioned in his skull. The exact field of view is up for debate, because this varies greatly from creature to creature, but Smaug most certainly has some form of depth perception. 

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