There you go. Life Detect would make it easy to spot and kill the dragon without any further fuss.
Didn't even think about using the Shout equivalent of Life Detect. DERP on me.
I think only the nearest LOD model was screwed up - he was quite easily visible at a distance while flying in the air. And yeah, I suppose the normals could have been flipped, although I don't know why I would have seen him at all in that case.
And I wasn't able to absorb the dragon's soul, so it might well have been a dragon I've previously killed. I never remember the names of the named ones, so it's possible.

