I’ve noticed that most world cultures seem to have the concept of “dragons.” To name a few, English mythology involves dragons, they feature prominently in Chinese art, I’ve seen African wood carvings of dragons, and the Welsh flag even depicts a dragon. The physical appearance of the dragon even seems rather consistent across cultures.
The logical explanation appears to be that dragons must have been real.
As of yet, remains of such a creature have not been discovered (or at least not made public.) So the remaining possibility is that the dragon is a fictional creation.
But why is the concept so widespread? Part of me wants to think that there were at one time real dragons running or flying around.
The myths probably arose as pre-historic peoples occasionally stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur bones. Surely such finds happened at least once or twice in history, and it’s an easy extrapolation to dragon legends. Without museums, or even a culture that was interested at all in preserving things, the fragile bones would not have lasted long.
Actually, there are very few similarities among the world’s “dragons.” As Europeans went out and began collecting tales from other lands, filtered through their own experiences, they tended to wedge mythological characters into boxes shaped by their own preconceptions. Any large, vaguely serpentine critter, thus became a dragon.
The Chinese “dragons,” for example, are not actually saurian as European dragons are. They would be much better matched to European elementals, possessing powers over the physical world, flying without wings, and demonstrating great wisdom. The Central American Quetzlcoatl was similar in a few ways to the Chinese creature that Europeans called “dragon,” but it was more physical, being covered in feathers.
Even the European dragon is actually a conflation of two separate critters, the winged drakon of Greece (and whatever similar critter the Greeks found in or borrowed from Mesopotamia) and the Northern European wurm that had no wings, crawled on the ground, and hoarded gold. There are a few cases of wurms spitting venom. The “fire breathing” characteristic was either attached to the Greek drakon or was a development from the venom spitting after the drakon and wurm were mixed together. Chinese “dragons” and Central American feathered reptiles spit neither fire nor venom. The older tales of European dragons (both drakon and wurm) portray them as mindless brutes of terror. They only develop intelligence when Christian mythology begins portraying them as either a form of or the minion of the devil. Any wisdom displayed by European dragons only shows up after Chinese tales have been introduced to Europe.
And I will go on record yet again as stating that I don’t buy the idea that dragons were initially inspired by dinosaur fossils. It’s late, and I am in desperate need of sleep (or something like it) so I will simply state that my reasons why are in the above linked thread, as well as the “When and Where did the word ‘Dragon’ first start showing up?” thread.