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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lam and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.

From green dragons to golden dragons, from solar dragons to lunar dragons, the world of dungeons and dragons has, well, a lot of dragons.

One variety that hasn't officially seen the light of days and second edition is the salt dragon of the forgotten realms setting.

These pale, yellow and white dragons were said to inhabit salt-incrusted lands and their breath weapon was fittingly salt-themed as well.

They expelled a cone of salt crystals that could blind and wound enemies both above and beneath the water.

While there are no true salt dragons in the natural world, we do have the Galapagos Marine Iguana, an endemic algae-eating iguana species that adapted to thrive on the isolated islands of the Galapagos.

These are marvelous creatures to watch, sometimes comical and amusing as they bask on shoreside rocks and landings, but utterly graceful in the water, while a shore, they frequently appear to sneeze.

This is actually a means of clearing excess salt from their bodies via special glands at the nostrils.

The resulting salt crystal sometimes encrust the thorny heads of the lounging creatures, giving them an even saltier appearance.

Those horny protrusions on the head, by the way, help scrape algae away from the rocks during feeding.

So for the marine iguana, salt sneezes are a means of removing excess levels of salt from the body, not a means of defense.

Though even Charles Darwin, in his book The Voyage of the Beagle, described the act as follows, quote,

they do not seem to have any notion of biting, but when much frightened, they squirt a drop of fluid from each nostril.

First impressions, surely, as the basking iguanas seem to regularly emit salt, regardless of perceived fright.

Still, this curious feature allows us an avenue by which to imagine the physiology of a fantastic salt dragon.

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