Cite? There’s actually very little if any historical record of people encountering or describing fossil bones before the early 1800s. If people had stumbled upon fossil bones, they kept very quiet about it. It’s possible fossil bones were found, but there is no evidence that dragon myths were based on them.
No, they haven’t kept quiet about it. They just didn’t know they were dinosaurs.
People hiking every year find dinosaurs bones, why do you think cavemen didn’t find any?
Let me introduce you to Adrienne Mayor’s two books on this, the First Fossil Hunters and Fossil Legends of the First Americans, in which she cites many cases of fossil finds well before 1800, and the stories that arose therefrom. I particularly like her driving the mythological creature the Griffin/Gryphon from finds of fossil ceratopsians (notably Ptotocertaops and Psitticasaurus).
Not that she’s the first to bring this up, she’s simply the most recent popularize of the idea. Willy Ley wrote popular accounts about early fossil finds in the 1950s and 1960s, and he was himself citing paleontology professionals. Oddly enough, fossil finds responsible for dragon legends, when they can be identified properly, turn out to be not dinosaur bones, but those of later giant mammals. Although Ley has made the suggestion that it was dinosaur bones that were responsible for the appearance of the Babylonian sirrush or mushushu. (L. Sprague de Camp took his idea and ran with it to create his historical novel Te Dragon of the Ishtar Gate)
As Sitnam observed, fossils certainly were found before 1800. The people back then just tried to fit them into their own known classes of creatures. “Dinosaurs” came about in the 19th century because people were more ready to seriously accept the concept of extinct species.
I’m hoping so, but I’ve been loathe to test my theory in a practical setting. A dragon would save me a lot of money on a car, and it could eat stray animals for food.
I think it’s quite possible, and IMHO probable, that both:
People have always been finding fossils, just not thinking of them as “extraordinarily preserved remains of long-extinct creatures”'; and
People are quite capable of inventing and telling stories about an imaginary creature without needing a fossil bone to base it on.
The idea that elephant skulls (fossil or current) inspired the cyclops is sort of plausible to me, but again it’s also plausible that they weren’t necessary, and there’s really no way for us to ever know, either.
Not impressed with that rain. I’m not sure exactly what kind of proof he’s looking for. but:
– It’s not just Greek and Babylonian. he ignores Mycenaean griffins
– It’s not just Protoceratops, but other forms like Psitticasaurus. Protoceratops might not have impressive bird-like talons, but Psitticasaurus did.
– I find the argument that “we don’t NEED that to explain…” unconvincing. If you find bones turned into rock of a giant bird-head with a beak, and with cat-like talons, and a non bird-like, often quadruped body, that is a more powerful incentive to create a griffin than simply imagining a bird crossed with a lion, blown up large. The skeleton actually give you the parts and tells you that this thing really existed.
As I heard the story, it was a geologist looking for a crater that could have caused the K-T line that visited the geological archives at the University of New Orleans and found the core samples that dated the impact crater. He went looking for the samples because of some off-the-record comments colleques in the oil industry made.
And now, a fossil site has been studied that formed about 45 minutes after the asteroid strike. Amber containing tektites. Fish with tektites clogging their gills. Incredibly amazing find.