Not many, but enough to perpetuate myths of dragons?
Is there any chance that say, maybe, a lingering family of one or two breeds of dinos survived long enough to create the idea of dragons and sea monsters?
There were definitely dinosaurs around during the so-called Dark Ages.
I believe they liked to serve them roasted, with an orange sauce.
Serious answer: no, the kind of dinosaurs you mean (i.e. not birds) - no, there is absolutely zero chance any survived to the 5th C. BCE.
There have never been any fully aquatic dinosaurs. So none of them could’ve possibly been sea beasts.
In** Adventures in Unhistory**, by Avram Davidson (which I highly recommend), he suggests that exaggerated reports of crocodiles were the basis for tales of dragons.
And fossils of dinosaurs existed, which may have contributed to this idea as well.
Absolutely, positively no possibility whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Xylophone. (Other than birds.)
However, there is the possibility that discoveries of fossils from dinosaurs and other extinct megafauna might have fed the imagination for inventing the idea of dragons.
It may be helpful for you to read up on the concept of Minimum Viable Population.
The dinosaurs themselves didn’t survive, but their bones certainly did. There are accounts of “dragon bones” being found in China for about as long as the country has existed.
That would be 5th century CE.
There is a sci-fi short story (Day of the Dragon) that is based on the theory that crocodiles are dragons with bum tickers. Someone fixes that problem and trouble ensues.
If I had asked you this same question about the coelacanth in 1937, what would you have said?
Why do legends have to have a basis in fact?
And even if they have a basis in fact, the factual basis is so far removed from the legend that there’s no there there.
So take for example Santa Claus. Fictional character. With a basis in fact! That fact being Nikolaos of Myra. Look him up on wikipedia. He sometimes gave gifts to people, so you can see where the whole living at the North Pole with reindeer and elves and wearing a red fur suit thing comes from.
In actual western legend, dragons were just thought of as large snakes–you know, worms. Add in some random magic powers, and you’ve got a dragon.
For goodness sake. The coelacanth is a creature hiding in the sea. Dinosaurs are land-based megafauna. We would have evidence of any more recent dinosaurs by now if they had existed. There’s no place for them to hide.
This is like saying that the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot existed.
The coelacanth was discovered ominously 1938, confusing scientists because they ordered the red snapper.
My, that was an interesting autocorrect.
I don’t think I have a Rai stone in my pants pocket, but I did once find a buffalo nickel in my change jar, so who knows?..
Hey, I’m happy to see you, too.
That it isn’t a dinosaur, for one thing. Gotcha!
65 million years ago, a big chunk of rock smashed down on what is now known as the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico with enough force that debris from the impact itself rained down as far north as Kentucky. More hot debris from the impact was thrown so high into the atmosphere that it ended up raining fire down all over the globe. Everywhere on earth, there is a layer of carbon corresponding to that date, meaning that the entire earth burned. Not just part of it, not just the area near the impact, the entire earth.
In other words, it was basically hell on earth.
Most things died. Not only most things, but most species died. The species that survived had most of their members killed, but managed to have enough survive to maintain viable populations.
Most of the survivors were small creatures that don’t need a lot of food to survive. Plant eaters (the few that hadn’t been cooked to death) no longer had plants to eat, though some tiny sprouts certainly grew out of the ashes. Anything big enough that it required more than a few tiny sprouts here and there starved to death. The meat eaters (again, those few that hadn’t been cooked to death) at first had a field day. Lots and lots of pre-cooked food everywhere! What a feast. Eventually though, they ran out of dead bodies, and with the surviving plant eaters dying off, the carnivores starved to death as well.
The largest things that survived were a few variants of crocodiles, which could submerge for reasonably long periods of time to avoid getting roasted in the initial flames. They could also go for long periods of time without eating, which enabled them to survive while other species starved to death.
Nothing big that flew survived.
Nothing bigger than a crocodile survived. In fact, few things bigger than a mouse survived.
Creatures in the ocean fared a bit better, since most of them weren’t burned to death after the impact. A lot of stuff in the ocean ended up dying as well though, which indicates that even after the initial fires died down, the Earth wasn’t a happy place to be, most likely suffering through decades of severe cold caused by sunlight being blocked by stuff thrown up from the impact combined with all kinds of stuff from volcanic eruptions. A rock that big slamming into the earth makes some pretty big shock waves, which cause earthquakes and tsunamis and triggers lots of volcanic eruptions, especially on the other side of the earth from the impact (called the antipodal point) due to the shock waves all converging on that point.
You almost have to wonder how anything at all survived. It was pretty nasty.
Chacoan Peccary, bitches!
Therefore, dinosaurs are dragons, dragons are dinosaurs. Ispo facto, corpus delecti, QED.
It is just about as likely that actual dragons existed in the middle ages as it is for dinosaurs to have survived to that time.
Also, even if the artistic renderings of dragons are dinosaurs, they’re very inaccurate to dinosaur physiology we are certain of. Especially when contrasted with generally accurate ancient renderings of other fauna, both living and extinct.
Just how many dragon’s have you seen with pinna/auricles, which are traits exclusive to mammals?