The common flying dragon glides on a wing made of ribs

In 1967, the paleontologist Edwin Colbert set out to read up on how the lizard Draco glides and found less than he expected. Some authors, he reported, doubted that it could glide at all. Others had watched it do exactly that, and he gathered their eyewitness accounts. His verdict: the gliding was more extensive and more subtle than most people realized.

The common flying dragon (Draco volans) is a small tree lizard of Southeast Asia, about as long as a pencil with its tail, according to the Animal Diversity Web, a University of Michigan database. It does not flap. It leaves a trunk, opens a fold of skin on each side of its body and sails to the next tree. The surprise is what holds that skin out. It is not an arm or a finger. It is the ribs.

This article covers how the rib wing works, how far the glides really go (the answer depends on who measured, and where), what one glide looks like from jump to landing, and what we know about the animal’s status. Some of the best measurements come from a close relative, so we flag that each time.

Meet the common flying dragon

Draco volans is an agamid lizard, a member of the Agamidae family. The Reptile Database says the genus Draco can be told from other agamid genera by its elongated ribs, which support a wing membrane. Draco is the biggest name in the gliding club: the Reptile Database cites a 2023 count that puts 41 of 82 gliding reptile species in this one genus.

The Animal Diversity Web gives the length as about 195 millimeters for males and 212 for females, tail included, which is roughly 7.5 to 8.5 inches. The diet is mostly small ants and termites. It is a sit-and-wait feeder: it stays beside a trunk and picks prey off as it passes, barely moving.

Where exactly it lives depends on whom you ask. The Animal Diversity Web places it in rain forests of southern India and Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Borneo. The Reptile Database lists Indonesia (Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, Java and Timor), West Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Palawan in the Philippines, and notes that several forms once treated as subspecies are now considered separate species. The lizard that Dehling filmed in southwestern India, which comes up below, is a different species, Draco dussumieri. That suggests the “southern India” in the older description reflects how the name used to be applied, though that is our reading and neither source says it. The safe summary: D. volans is a Southeast Asian lizard whose borders on the map are still being redrawn.

A wing made of ribs

Bats stretch skin over finger bones, and birds grow feathers on a forelimb. Draco took another route. Each side of its body has five, six or seven extra-long ribs that stick out past the trunk, with a membrane, a thin sheet of skin, stretched between them. Colbert described this in 1967, and J. Maximilian Dehling confirmed it in a 2017 study in PLOS ONE. Picture pulling a hand fan out of your own rib cage.

On a walking lizard the wings fold back against the body. At launch, muscles swing the ribs out and the membrane opens. Both papers name the same muscles, the iliocostalis and the intercostals, which run along and between the ribs. Colbert noted that the elongated ribs begin well behind the shoulders and end well in front of the hips. That leaves all four legs free to climb and run, which a bat-style wing would not.

Then comes a twist from Dehling’s work with Dussumier’s flying lizard (Draco dussumieri) in India. After takeoff, the lizard reaches its forelimbs back and up and sets its hands on the front edge of the wing. Its own hands become the leading edge, a thick bar in front of a thin trailing edge. Dehling calls the result a composite wing, built from skin, ribs and hands, and says this type was not known before. Colbert, working in 1967 mostly from preserved specimens, described the wing as roughly semicircular, with no well-defined front edge. The newer work adds a detail the older picture lacked.

Dehling also describes a cambered wing (curved on top, like an airplane wing) and a lizard that arches its back in flight. Its throat flaps are sometimes extended and might act like small front wings, he says, but that has not been tested.

One more number from Colbert: when he compared body weight with wing area, the lizards’ wing loading (weight carried per unit of wing) looked like that of large soaring birds such as hawks and vultures, not like that of small birds. He thought the big wing area makes up for a wing shape that is less efficient than a bird’s.

Colbert’s comparison with Triassic gliders is a 1967 view, and the fossil story has moved. A 2022 ScienceDaily report on a study of Coelurosauravus, a gliding reptile from the Late Permian (260 million to 252 million years ago), says earlier work assumed its wing was held out by rib extensions, as in Draco. The new study instead suggests the membrane came from belly bones or trunk muscles. The sources we read do not settle it, so the age of rib wings in particular is an open question.

How far does a glide go?

The short answer: about 8 meters in the best-known field record, up to 26 in other work, and 60 in a staged test. The table puts the numbers side by side.

Read it with care. The 8-meter average comes from a herpetologist named Hairston, who noted that the distances were probably set by the setting: coconut palms are usually planted 8 to 10 meters apart. In other words, the lizard’s average glide may say more about a farmer’s planting plan than about the lizard.

Hairston also estimated the heights in one flight: about 6 meters at takeoff and 3 at landing, over 7.6 meters of distance. By our arithmetic that is about 2.5 meters forward for each meter dropped. He described the flight as slow, near the point where a wing stops holding the air, with a slight upturn at the end.

The 60-meter figure needs context too. It comes from experiments by Hans Klingel, summarized by Colbert, in which lizards jumped from a 10-meter pole toward artificial trees. That shows what the animals can do, not what they usually do. Hairston made a similar point: a habitat that demanded flights that long would probably be unattractive to these lizards.

Dehling reports about 500 glides of Dussumier’s flying lizard in plantations in Karnataka, India, mostly tree to tree, with a top speed of about 6.8 meters per second, around 15 miles per hour. Khandelwal and Hedrick used motion-capture cameras on the same species in 2022 and recorded 24 complete glides between trees 5.5 meters apart.

One glide, start to finish

Here is a worked example, stitched together from the studies above. The details come from different species and methods, so it is a composite, not one recording.

1. Climb and aim. The lizard climbs a trunk and turns its head toward the ground before it jumps, says the Animal Diversity Web.
2. Jump. Dehling measured a takeoff speed of about 2 meters per second. The ribs spread and the hands reach back to the wing’s front edge within roughly 0.17 to 0.46 seconds.
3. Dive, then glide. Klingel described three phases for Draco: a steep dive, a long glide that spends the speed gained in the dive, and a final upward swoop. In the 2022 study, the lizards tilted their bodies so the wing met the air at about 25 degrees, which the authors say keeps the wing near its best ratio of lift to drag.
4. Steer. Dehling credits the forelimbs, working the wing’s front edge. One hand sometimes touches down first and causes a slight swerve. He also recorded spiral descents and one turn of nearly 180 degrees in mid-air.
5. Land. The wing tilts up and the speed drops. The hands let go, the membrane folds against the body, and the forelimbs hit the tree first, often gripping. Dehling timed the release at about one thirtieth of a second.

On the trunk: ants, throat flags and nests

Males have a long, pointed, bright yellow dewlap (a throat flap) used in displays. Females have a smaller, bluish-gray one. Both sexes carry rows of brown spots on top of the wing and black spots underneath, according to the Animal Diversity Web.

The same source says breeding is presumed to happen in December and January. Before mating, the male circles the female three times, a courtship with a lap count. The female digs a small hole in the soil with her head, lays about five eggs, covers them and guards them for roughly a day. Incubation takes about 32 days. These are single-source details from a database account that may rest on few observations, so read them as a sketch.

The Animal Diversity Web adds that the lizard glides only to get around. It does not glide to escape danger, and it does not glide in rain or wind. When threatened, it climbs.

Common mistakes and myths about flying lizards

Myth: it flies like a bat. None of the studies we read describes flapping. The animal jumps, opens its wing and glides downhill, trading height for distance.

Overstated: the 60-meter flights are normal. They came from a test with a tall pole. The field record for D. volans averages about 8 meters, and its author tied that to how far apart the trees were.

Doubtful: it glides to escape predators. The Animal Diversity Web says it climbs to escape, and Dehling saw most of his roughly 500 glides go from tree to tree. That is one database account plus a study of a relative, so read it as the best current description, not a closed question.

Mix-up: a flying dragon is a small Komodo dragon. Same nickname, different animal. The Komodo dragon is a giant predator of Indonesian islands, while lizards of this genus weigh roughly 5 to 30 grams, by Colbert’s figures.

Careful: not every number is for D. volans. Dehling and Khandelwal and Hedrick studied D. dussumieri, and Colbert’s wing measurements came mostly from another species, D. whiteheadi. The wing plan is shared across the genus. The numbers are not interchangeable.

Not so: one lizard, one trick. Lizards solve problems in different ways. The Common basilisk runs across water, the Thorny devil drinks through its skin, and the flying dragon sails on its ribs.

Conservation status

The common flying dragon is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. That is the category as distributed by GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and we checked it on November 9, 2026. Least Concern means the species was evaluated and does not meet the criteria for a threatened or near-threatened category.

The sources we opened do not name specific threats or give a population count. The Animal Diversity Web calls the lizard apparently common. It also says the IUCN had not evaluated it, which differs from the category we read, so that note may be out of date. Trees matter to an animal that travels by glides from trunk to trunk, but our sources do not say how forest loss affects this species, so we will not guess. Dehling did film hundreds of glides of a relative in coconut and areca nut plantations, so planted trees can work for some flying lizards. We have no confirmed population trend.

Categories are reviewed and can change, and the copy GBIF distributes can trail the IUCN website by some months, which is why we print the date we checked. GBIF’s copy does not give the year of the IUCN assessment, so we do not state one.