If I offered to show you the actual Santa Claus and then pulled out Nikolaos of Myra, have I really showed you the actual Santa Claus? Yes, Nikolaos is the nugget of fact behind the myth, but the mythical Santa Claus of 2017 American pop culture has almost nothing in common with Nikolaos.
An “actual” dragon, in ancient greek δράκων, is just a serpent. And then we add a few fictional details to the snake. Like it’s bigger. Monstrous, you know? And maybe it breathes out poison spray instead of just a poison bite. Maybe it has legs or fins or horns, or extra heads. It’s a monster, so maybe it’s guarding something–a sacred site, a maiden, a treasure? And the drakōn is associated with Cthonic or watery powers, so who knows. Maybe that poison spray we talked about was really fire. Heck, give it some wings. Does its blood has something magical about it? Maybe the serpent has some human qualities too, like maybe it can talk, or take human shape.
At some point our little serpent has turned into something completely different. A big magic snake is just a snake, right? But add enough magical monstrosity to it and it’s something else.
It doesn’t look very much like any species of dinosaur I’ve ever heard of.
But maybe a new type of dinosaur evolved in the 65 million years since the end of the Cretaceous! That had two pairs of wings! And two pairs of legs! And breathed fire!
An aside, Thomas Jefferson found bones from a mastodon (then called mammoth), and presented them to the American Philosophical Society. With this organization and as President, he pursued (and also tasked Lewis & Clark, among others) the gathering and collating of such bones relating to America’s past. He was quite into it. One of many things that made him extraordinary. I also hear his key lime pie was to die for.
That 1937 was still pretty early in the history of modern science and that lots of unknown species were still being discovered. Especially extinct species being discovered by fossil remains.
But in 2017 it’s unlikely that paleontology is still going to discover anything as big as fossil evidence of sixty million years of unknown dinosaurs.
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer saw partial remains, and asked the locals to preserve the next one they found with salt. They butchered it and salted the fillets.
The closest thing to some “ancient” species actually being alive when modern humans were around that I can remember is there were some woolly mammoths still roaming about when the great pyramid in Egypt was built. At this point they were only left on some extremely remote island in northern Siberia and I doubt there were any humans alive at that point who saw one but they were still on the planet when modern humans were zooming about.
Obviously this is waaaay after dinosaurs unless you want to count things like crocodiles or alligators.
I think there is a possibility that in some remote valley or island a couple of dinosaur species could have survived.
Or I think its possible that some other large reptiles could have evolved afterwards. I mean if dinos could evolve once, why not again? But again, in limited numbers and area.
As I understand it the kamodo dragon was limited to one small island in Indonesia. Now is it a surviving “dinosaur” or did it evolve on its own?
Also reports down thru the ages were pretty detailed on “dragons” or other large and scary “beasts” that different heroes killed. Sadly they were hunted down just like lions were all hunted out of Europe and grizzly bears almost wiped out of North America.
Your mission–if you should choose to accept it–is to read post number 17 17 times.
No, there is no chance whatsoever that large dinosaurs have been hanging around for 65 million years unnoticed. In fact, finding surviving large dinosaurs would be such a mind-numbingly significant event, it would be proof of either time-travel or Young Earth Creationism. Find me a living sauropod and I’ll start saving for an expedition to Mount Ararat, because it would damn well mean that Noah’s Ark is sitting up there.
Komodo dragons are generally classified as lizards, due to both genetics and physiology. Lizards and dinosaurs are sufficiently different in physiology (and probably genetics, but there’s essentially no usable evidence of what dinosaur DNA was like to tell) for it to be pretty obvious that k.dragons aren’t dinosaurs.
Aquatic reptiles still breathe air and therefore have to surface to breathe. Coelacanths don’t. Air-breathers are going to be harder to miss, especially since oceanic traffic has increased over the centuries.