The term "baby dragon", or less often "gray dragon", refers to any juvenile dragon with grayish scales and no elemental abilities. Although baby dragons, once hatched, do not gain their adult scales for up to 25 years, they are frequently booted from their mother's nest once they are 10, leaving them to fend for themselves in the Uncivilized Area. As such, most of the baby dragons encountered in the UA are between 10 and 20 years old. On average, baby dragons encountered in the UA are roughly 5 feet tall when standing on all four legs, about 6 foot 6 inches long from snout to tail, and weigh approximately 2000 pounds, or about 0.9 metric tons.
Dragons are large creatures resembling winged lizards, possessing a long neck with a reptilian head, a large but slender body, four legs armed with four-toed claws, a pair of bat-like wings, and a long tail armed with spikes at the tip, similar to a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer thagomizer]. Baby dragons learn to use their wings as soon as possible, so that they learn to fly and hover in the air, typically to attack or harass prey (or other dragons) from above. Interestingly, dragons do possess horns (and the length and shape of those horns is a good indicator of age), but do not appear to use them as weapons.
Dragons of all types are carnivorous, with jaws strong enough to rip the flesh and bones off of humans and other sapients, and have no trouble whatsoever digesting flesh, bone, fat and sinew alike. The digestive system of a dragon is advanced enough to extract and assimilate up to 95% of the proteins, fat, and other nutrients from any of the food they eat. Dragons prefer prey that are both meaty and fat so they are able to extract the most food energy out of them, requiring on average 20 000 kilocalories per day. On rare occasions, they will seek and eat food prepared by sapients, up to and including processed food items, though they often have problems properly digesting such items. Though it is most likely a measure of desperation driven by survival, some have suggested that certain dragons will pillage food reserves entirely out of spite and hatred.