http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Skeletal_Dragon

Anyone have theories on what these are? I can't seem to find anything about them and was wondering if people had any ideas on how one can be animated. Undeath does not seem like something possible for a creature such as a TES Dragon. At least from my understanding. The critically important thing to me is to understand how this skeletal dragon could come into being. Basic Necromancy seems too obvious and unfitting for such a creature. Some mechanics stand out. This Dragon does not have a Soul. Is it a puppet? Yet it using the Thu'um seems almost contradictory to me in that instance.

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I am trying to get back into Skyrim and figured this was a good launching point if any. I don't much care for the game mechanics in many instances, but the lore has proven to hold my interest.

On that note, any elaboration on Dragons and how they function as a whole would be nice. I pretty much dropped Skyrim without finishing the main quest and such so please spoiler anything relevant. I have built up a basic idea of what happened overtime while browsing the forums, but I would prefer to avoid the details unless they are precisely relevant to this topic or another post therein.

I don't know. In both TES IV and TES V, it doesn't seem to be well defined. In both games, there are several ghosts that are freed from undead forms even when you soultrap them. If you have black soul gems, you can take it a step further and supposedly steal the souls of several characters, such as the Camoran siblings or one of the many people that appear in Sovngarde when you kill them. Perhaps it's game mechanics. Perhaps it's something more. I have a hypothesis that in the case of undead, the energies animating them form a facsimile of their soul, or perhaps ensnare their soul, and it is this energy you absorb when you kill an undead, rather than absorb their actual soul.

Alternately, perhaps dragon souls touched by necromancy simply cannot be absorbed. Hence why Durnehviir and Potema were also not absorbed when defeated. Again, could be game mechanics to some degree, but let's face it, that's boring.