I personally have to go with the dinosaur angle. We're always finding human remains that date further and further back in time, so why not go the other way too? I suspect someday we'll discover dinosaur fossils that date to after humans walked the earth and find out the earliest humans actually briefly shared the world with a few dinosaurs that survived whatever made them extinct(there's a lot of different theories on what killed them, but this is not the place!). So the early man ran into Dinosaurs, told all his buddies that he ran into this giant lizard and drew him a picture on the cave wall, and eventually as the few remaining dinosaurs died out and there were no more face to face contact with them, over a few generations the stories started to become exagerated like all tales do when passed down verbally from generation to generation, and eventually we have giant fire breathing magical creatures who fly.

Discuss!

(omg so I'm bored sue me)

quote:

---

Kalculus Kid or Mathinator or Waisz had this to say about Robocop:
They might've come across fossils and tried to imagine the creature those fossils belonged to.

---

Similar to how some believed elephant skulls were that of cyclopses.

quote:

---

A sleep deprived Kalculus Kid or Mathinator or Waisz stammered:
They might've come across fossils and tried to imagine the creature those fossils belonged to.

---

So many different cultures coming to such similar results from such speculations would be more impressive than if dragons actually did exist.

Not to mention layering of fossils found today.. 2 fossils fused together.. (lizard with bird for example).

Also, though this is somewhat more far-fetched, more fossils are found near former water holes and other well-visited areas. Fossils that some found could have been jumbled together.

quote:

---

Demos was naked while typing this:
That, and sea serpents, or water dragons, were probably crocodiles / alligators. Considering how crocs grab people and thrash, it would look like some demonic creature to a medieval inhabitant. Or perhaps the idea was also due to sharks, but sharks are pretty much in other parts of the world than were mentioned.

---

Yeah. The Biblical leviathan is actually represented more as a crocodile than the more contemporary sea serpent.

Between the fossils of crocodile or alligator ancestors and the massive size of the nile crocodiles, it's easy to see one source of the dragon concept.

quote:

---

Snoota had time to sputter this out before being killed by an Orcish Fodder:
American Indians

---

American Indian dragons...? Never heard of that before, sounds interesting. What's a Native American myth with a dragon in it?

quote:

---

ACES! Another post by Gunslinger Moogle:
American Indian dragons...? Never heard of that before, sounds interesting. What's a Native American myth with a dragon in it?

---

Angont is probably the most famous one.

Most of those are Sea Serpents, but there's a few Dragon-esque things in there.(Like the aforementioned Agnont!)

For instance

"Shh." and "Hmm?" are universal in meaning

The left hand is universally regarded as evil, dirty, or otherwise unsavory, and the right hand is universally regarded as favorable, fast, and skilled.

quote:

---

Gunslinger Moogle's account was hax0red to write:
American Indian dragons...? Never heard of that before, sounds interesting. What's a Native American myth with a dragon in it?

---

There was also the feathered winged serpent Quetzalcoatl from the Mayan stories.

And on a side note, there is the legend Rainbow Snake from Austrailia.

interesting also that africa/india havn't been noted..

I know when most folks chug down a quart of Old Overcoat, they see all kinds of colorful creatures. The kind of creatures you'd have to pay $7.50 at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Odditorium to see these days.

quote:

---

Trillee thought this was the Ricky Martin Fan Club Forum and wrote:
I do remember reading once that in the Congo, the natives would tell explorers of giant lizard like creatures out in the jungle, they're description matched that of one of the plant eating veriaty of dinos

---

You're thinking of the Mokele Mbembe. (Spelling may be off a bit.)

2. Ogopogo was a "Loch Ness Monster" style "sea serpent" in some Native American cultures.

As for what it was...I'm always fond of the idea that dragons were always one of those metaphorical, allegorical story-concepts that people, mistakenly translating information, found a common thread in because they were looking for one, then found "evidence" that supported it. Sound ridiculous? It isn't.

For instance, dinosaur bones were always getting mixed up. There was a dino with spikey thumb claws. For some reason, although the "horn-thumbs" were listed with the right dino, they were for centuries listed as nose horns until someone with some knowledge of animal physiology corrected the error.

Bahamut, probably the world's most famous dragon thanks to the Final Fantasy games, isn't actually a dragon. In Sumerian mythology (and broadly translated as Behemoth in Christian mysticism), he was actually a sort of megalithic turtle. It was later historians and fiction-writers who portrayed him as a sort of all-powerful dragon. D&D (and Gary Gygax in particular) are responsible for the portrayal of Behemoth as a sort of celestial dragon (the counterpart, interestingly enough, to the evil Dragon goddess Tiamat, who in HER original real-world mythology was only occasionally represented as a serpent).

What you define as a dragon is important too. Keep in mind that Sigurd's dragon Fafnir was in fact a megalithic firebreathing serpent with no wings or legs, and at that was a humanoid/human who had transformed himself into the fire-breathing megaserpent. Eastern dragons favor the serpent with the expressive lion-like face (which when translated over by Western artists ends up with an oddly moustached crocodilian head). Wyverns are like dragons in most respects, but lack forepaws (or more to the point their wings ARE their forepaws) and usually pack a barbed tail (Dragons may or may not); but even that is a more recent distinction cooked up by fantasy writers (and, again, D&D). Is Hercules' Hydra a dragon? Hell the famous white-man-god-dragon-feathered-serpent Quetzacoatl is almost more bird than dragon. Point is that with something as variant in image as a dragon, incorporating almost chimerically the physical traits and aspects of other animals in nature, how can you really say it's anything more than a "worst case scenario" monster? Why have people in, say, Judaea cooking up the Apocalypse story (yes I know the Book of Revelations was actually written in Europe, but the book of the Bible it was more or less copied from was written by the Hebrews in Judaea as part of the Torah) only based the monster on what they've seen? Because it's a localized variant? Or more likely because the aspects were the sort of real monsters they'd encountered?

As I said earlier, I tend to see dragons as an allegorical creature. For Easterners, they represent positive and negative balance, and in the translation of those balances, forces of nature. In the western tradition, dragons are often, even in the best of times, greedy, destructive monsters. Think of them as metaphors for people. In Eastern philosophies, harmony with the world around you was greatly sought after, and bringing discord to the order was almost endlessly problematic. In the west, what is truly worse than some powerful, rich, healthy, seemly unstoppable juggernaut? In the East it's an allegory about the path you take leading to the destination you chose a long time ago. In the West, it's a cautionary tale about those who put greed and power before all else, even for the good of others.