Lore

The Gaping Dragon resides in The Depths.
It is a descendant of the Everlasting Dragons, but its eternal hunger transformed its upper body into a maw.

Design Works Interview

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Miyazaki: We pursued two main avenues when designing Dark Souls: in the initial concept stages I gave each of the artists a few simple "image words" to use as a starting point and then they were free to develop these in whatever way they wished. We then took the images we liked, adjusted them where necessary and used them to begin shaping the world. For example the Gaping Dragon, Egg Carrier and Gravelord Nito all emerged during this stage and made it almost unchanged into the final game.

Miyazaki: I'm a huge fan of the Gaping Dragon. It's a little different from the other dragons in the world, it's part of an ancient race of mineral based life forms, existing since long before the emergence of mankind, yet, despite its superiority over us, its time has passed, and it finds itself alone in the world, the last of its race forced to survive in any way it can. As to what triggered this change… well, the emergence of life corrupted it, it was warped by emotion and desire…

When we were initially discussing the design, we came up with the theme of greed. After that, Mr. Nakamura produced the design remarkably quickly. You would expect designs based around this theme to be either fat or have a huge mouth, but that's a little too predictable. When I saw the design I was genuinely surprised and absolutely delighted.

Otsuka: It just ate and ate so much that he turned out like this?

Nakamura: Yes, it was completely consumed by the desire to eat, so much that it began to adapt and the parts of its body began to retrogress. It no longer eats with its mouth but takes food directly into its body, but it had to change this way in order to survive. Aside from eating its lost any faculties it may have once possessed and has to survive in this desolate, harsh environment by eating anything it can. It simply did what it had to, to continue to exist.

Miyazaki: You can almost imagine it saying things like "you're too far away", "get over here, I want to eat you". Of course, these words never came up in the design process as I never imagined the creature would develop in this way, but I think it's a really incredible design. As I said before I love working together with the artists, I really think it benefits both of us. In fact I'd go so far as to say that it's my favourite part of the job.