Imagine that scientists found a dragon’s body, well-preserved in an ice cave. Just think of the questions they might begin to explore: Could such creatures fly? Did they really breathe fire? How did they care for their young?

“Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real,” a 90-minute Animal Planet special set to air at 7 p.m. Sunday, attempts to answer these questions as it intertwines mythology with science to explain fantasy facts.

“We’re imagining dragons in a way not done before, as real animals — as living, fire-breathing creatures,” said Charlie Foley, who created the show, which he wrote and developed with Kevin Mohs.

“It started as ‘What if we found a body?’ — as part of a mystery, like the Stone Age man that was found near the Austrian-Italian border,” Mohs said. “We used it as the launch point.”

Dragons have existed in the myths and legends of nearly every culture. Could these stories be more than myth?

“You have the same mythical animal in the Scandinavian, Aztec and Chinese cultures,” Mohs said. “The Inuits have a dragon myth — and in an area with no reptile to base a dragon on. How did they come up with the idea of a great, green, winged reptile?”

“Dragons” uses realistic-looking computer-generated imagery (CGI) to tell the stories of four groups of the mythical beasts — prehistoric, marine, forest and mountain. It begins with a young prehistoric dragon encountering a ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex.

Framestore Visual Effects and Animation Studio of London — which did the CGI work in the “Harry Potter” movies and in Discovery Channel’s “Walking With Dinosaurs” — created the stunning images.

“When we went to London to pitch what we wanted to do, the head of the company said, ‘Quite honestly, you can’t afford us — but we don’t want anybody else to do it.’ We knew the animation would be fantastic,” Foley said.

Dragons:

The show smoothly segues between the CGI animation sequences to scenes that depict the frozen dinosaur body and the resulting autopsy that occurs as scientists try to unravel the mysteries of the beast. A dragon corpse 20 feet long from snout to tail tip was handcrafted for these scenes.

“I was there for the autopsy take,” Foley said, “and there (the dragon) was, under a tarpaulin with ice surrounding it. The detail was there. Even the parts of it that were never exposed to the camera were labored over.”

Actor Patrick Stewart — well known for his role as “Star Trek” Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and for his majestic voice laced with a British accent — narrates the tale.

Stewart missed only one cue, Foley said. “He was watching the monitor and got caught up in the story line. That really tickled us.”

The show aims to use real science to explain how these winged creatures could have existed. Peter J. Hogarth, who teaches biology at the University of York and has written a book about dragons, was assigned the task of making dragons biologically plausible.

“Start by assuming that dragons did exist and work out how they could have functioned,” Hogarth said. “If you think of a very large flying animal, the only way dragons could have flown was to have something more than muscle power. What could it have been?”

The program theorizes that dragons had sacs filled with hydrogen to aid with flight. “Giving hydrogen for flight helped with fire-breathing as well,” Hogarth said.

However, dragons needed a way to ignite the hydrogen, Hogarth said. So the writers devised a theory that dragons ingested platinum. “Platinum is rare — and we are stretching geology a bit — but it would work as a catalyst to ignite the hydrogen,” Hogarth mused. “But dragons must be careful about when they inhale. That would be bad news.”