Medieval Europe, Ancient China…all of them have myths about dragons. Dragons that fit the description of dinsaurs just a little too well. Yet, in everyday life, these people didn’t have any beasts to base the image on. The discovery of the first dinosaur fossils were still centuries in the future.
Okay, so they had lizards crawling on rocks and walls. But from a lizard to a dragon is a really big step. It would have been far more likely for those people in antiquity, if they had wanted to come up with a monster based on the exaggeration of an every day pest, to come up with monsters based on giant spiders, or giant snakes, or giant rats. Yet none of those are as prevalent as the myths about dragons.
There is a theory out there that many mythological creatures were based on fossil bones.
Ancient peoples saw prehistoric bones exposed by erosion and assumed that they were recent. The bones didn’t match any ordinary creatures so they must have come from extra-ordinary creatures. Their guesses as to the appearance of the creatures that left the bones were a little less educated than those of modern paleontologists.
Fossil bones have been found in ancient Greek ‘heroes tombs’.
What makes you think dragons and dinosaurs resemble each other that much? They’re both large reptilian things, but dinosaurs didn’t typically breathe air or fly (Yes, I’m aware of the pteranodon, but most dinosaurs weren’t like that.), and did not have mystical powers or incredible lifespan, that we know of.
these people were aware of dinosaur bones. They saw them when the land erroded or if they were digging up trenches or whatnot for one purpose or another. There was even an archaeologist in China recently (can’t find the cite now, of course) who was talking to an old medicine woman about the “dragon bones” she used in some of her medicines. He followed her to her cache of these dragon bones and, of course, they turned out to be dinosaur bones.
Also there’s the whole Anglo take on it, which I believe is where they get the idea that dragons horded gold and treasure. They often referred to greedy kings in their poetry as dragons who horded gold, cause the king wouldn’t properly dole out his phat lewts amongst his [del]party members[/del] vassels
Aside from that weirdness, however, I think you have a point. It’s stretching it a bit to say dinosaurs and dragons are all that similar. Chinese dragons don’t look anything like dinosaurs, really.
Dragons seem to be, in many if not all cases, distinctly similar to snakes, an animal to which humans are instinctively prone to fearing. The reptilian nature of dragons may simply be acocunted for by them being snakes grown gigantic and terrifying. That woiuld make their similarly to dinosaurs purely coincidental; all indications are that our awareness of there once having been huge creatures related to reptiles postdates the assignment of reptilian traits to dragons.
Other large animals are quite frequently featured in lots of old and ancient literature. The modern popularity of dragons doesn’t match historic. Lists of legendary creatures - Wikipedia
During the first spread of mankind from Africa across the globe, there were lots of giant animals. We proceeded to kill them all off. So it makes sense that there would be stories of large, people eating monsters in the forest.
One far-out theory is that dragons were actually rare spontaneous instances of neotony in salamanders, where they remained in their carnivorous larval stage and grew to crocodilian proportions. Neotony is common among salamanders and interestingly enough, they are common in the two regions most associated with dragons: China is home to the Giant Chinese Salamander and northern Europe to many species of salamanders and newts. Supposedly dragons were more common in ancient times but the introduction of iron weapons made killing these predators easier, and they were gradually exterminated.
There are lots of sources for the “Dragon” idea, and you shopuld be aware that not all dragons are identical, even withinone culture.
1.) The “Dragons” in Greek and Roman myth and in the Medieval Bestiaries were, properly, snakes, and the name translates as that. Although some of these heroes are described as killing “dragons”, in the original stories they were killing large serpents. In Roman times and later in Medieval times these creatures were exaggerated in size. Medieval illustrators had a habit of putting ears and even feet on them, which made them look even more dragon-like. But they started as snakes
2.) It’s been suggested that many dragons were inspired by lightning. Chinese dragons fit this especially well – they live in the sky (especially in storm clouds), are often golden in color, have long, sinuous bodies, and have all those extra forked-lightning-like tendrils. And it’s not just the Chinese dragons that fit this.
3.) Many Dragons DO seem to have been inspired by fossils and by non-fossil concretions. Oddly enough, it’s rarely dinosaur fossils that inspired these. One German city with a sculpture of a dragon still have the head it was based on – it was a Wooly Rhinocerous skull. You can read about these in the popular works of Willy Ley. A More recent exponent of the notion is Adrienne Mayor, whose book The First Fossil Hunters compares fossil finds with legends of monster bones. Again, almost all of them are giant mammals.
4.) There was a notion that the Babylonian Sirrush might be based on some surbibing creature, since the carving of it on the Ishtar Gate looks very dinosaur-like, right down to the irdlike claws. Ley himself seemed to believe this, but it’s a very unlikely notion. Still, iyt’s possible that a large monitor lizard (like the still-extant Komodo Dragon) might have helped inspire ythis. That’s the tack L. Sprague de Camp took when he wrote the historical novel The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate.
When I was helping Cecil research things for the “eating mammoths” column, I came across several reports, of varying credibility, claiming that the Chinese had a verbal and written record of “dragons” and “hairy monsters” from up north, in a region where wooly mammoths may have been extant until very recent prehistory. The thought is that oral tradition carried down tales of conflicts and/or hunting with these beasts, and that became transmogrified into tales of dragons.
I find it a very romantic idea, although I do not know that there is any “proof” of it.
The ancient people didn’t put all the bones together to make a skeleton, they just found big bones and let their imagination put together what they were from in the first place.
It’s likely that modern humans did in fact encounter truly big-assed, ferocious lizards (more than twice the size of komodos) in Australia and thereabouts:
So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that scaly, toothy, legged dragons are descended from a long-term (and long-distance) folk memory.
What about crocodiles? There are some pretty huge-ass ones still roaming around today. Extend their legs a bit and throw some wings on them and they can be reasonably dragon-like.
Considering the vast amount of different monsters believed to exist, i’d find it more surprising if there were none at all that were similar to ancient beasties.
I find that hard to believe. It is virtually impossible to think up an animal, if it fundamentally unlike animals you know from every day life. Have you seen medivial pictures of lions, made by people who never saw a lion in their life? Or maybe saw a skull or a skin? They didn’t do any better then yellow dogs with a bigger head. It isn’t for nothing that most mytical creatures supplied by Sage rat are combinations of familiar things. A fish with a womans’ upper body. A lion (sort of) with an eagles’ head. Cut and paste jobs, really.
The modern skill to imagine a dinosaur from lumpy scattered bones is a very modern skill, one that comes from eihter years of study, or knowing what the animal is supposed to look like; and that latter thing is something a chinese lady raised in dragon-lore has in common with anyone from the West who has seen “Jurassic Park”.
Besides, it is VERY hard for a simple medieval person to SEE anything (brownish lumpy bones) that is:
a. against one’s religion to acknowledge. Religion said God had made all creatures that existed; so, no other creatures could exist, unless they were devils. It wasn’t untill the 1700’s that the theory of “multiple creations” bevame religiously accepted to explain increasing fossil finds.
b. not worth anything. In my home town Maastricht, where fossils were found in the limestond quarrys with great frequency, they were seen as hazards; a fossil could mess up the structural integrity of a good limestone block, making it unsafe for building, so, worthless. It wasn’t untill the late 1700’s that scientists began to pay quarrymen to save the fossils for them.
c. Not something you’ve been trained to see. It is hard for most, if not all men, to notice something that is outside your frame of reference.
So, why are the major land monsters dragons? Why not giant rats, giant stone zombies, or any other variant of “giant, evil version of an everyday thing/beastie”? Why giant versions of the humble shy little green lizard that catches flies on the rocks beside the road and is no threat whatsever to any human?
There are no lions in Europe, yet you find depiction of lion on every second coat of arms. And they were universally feared and considered as human-eating monster on equal footing with dragons.
But there were lions in Europe. Both wild and in royal menageries. The Greeks and Romans coexisted with Wild European Lions. They apparently made it to around 20 BC in Italy and 100 AD in other places.
