Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20181103233945/@comment-31763506-20190725214659

I think they made a distinction between the wastelands (Megail's is the cruelest path) blasted by the war and the proper pre-existing desert on the way to Eustrin, and the skeleton appears in the latter.

Shallow burial also doesn't help stop bone decomposition that much, based on my Googling earlier today. Actually makes it worse, IIRC. If the burial was deep and sudden... "under miles of soil" as you say, you've now gone amother level of "a wizard did it" deep, because you now have to explain how geological strata that would accumulate over millions and billions of years got laid down in historical time.

EDIT: Y'all are also grossly underestimating the total amount of mechanical energy needed to excavate "miles" of soil. Let's say a 1 km radius 1 km deep gets ejected about 1 km straight up. Pi cubic kilometeters of dirt is Pi * 10^15 cubic cm. Dirt is 1.33 g per cubic cm per Google. 4.18 * 10 ^ 12 kg of mass then. Gravitational potential energy is what we'll call 10 m / s ^2 * 1000 m * 4.18 * 10 ^ 12 kg = 4.18 * 10 ^ 16 joules. By ridiculous coincidence, Google says the conversion factor of joules to megatons is dividing by 4.184 * 10 ^ 15, so we'll say a nice round 10 megatons.

So a perfectly respectable metropolis killer hydrogen bomb. That's assuming the energy is uniformly applied to all the dirt accelerating it straight up. A real explosion would have to be a couple orders of magnitude larger owing to omnidirectionality and mechanical inefficiency.

If the OG Incubus King could throw that around on a whim, it ain't just the dragons that would be extinct.

EDIT TO EDIT: If the skeleton was unearthed in a "battle with massive spells", then why is it fully articulated and exposed? If it's a fossil sunk into the bedrock that loose topsoil got blown off of, some of the bones should be embedded in the bedrock, but they're all on the surface. If it was bones in loosely packed earth, the skeleton should have been blown apart like everything else, instead it appears neatly in the configuration it was in when the dragon died.