How long have Humans been talking about Dragons? Could the use of this word be older than the setting of many of the stories they are told in?
Not only Dragons, but other Animals as well… Unicorns for example,
Manufactured Unicorns have been made (Rhinos with modified horns) so does this animal have any roots in realaity?
Half and Half creatures (Sphinxes, Griffins, Cenotaurs, Mermaids, Cockatrices) should be excluded from this discussion. Unless you have proof they did exist. :eek: at which point I would eat my hat…
When I worked at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, they had a pen of long-horned goats, one of which had just a single horn (The other one probably broke off). I think there’s some basis for unicorns based on that; Narwhals off of Scandanavian coasts are said to be an inspiration for them, and if some Medieval Norseman needed a unicorn’s horn for whatever reason, the narwhal’s was an acceptable substitute.
Yes, the “unicorn” itself is thought to be based originally on garbled descriptions of the Indian Rhinoceros, the first by the Greek writer Ctesias in 389 BC.
My own theory as to the invention of dragons is this. People found dinosaur fossils and made some fairly logical conclusions. This would explain why so many cultures from the widespread corners of the earth all had stories about large reptiles.
And except that people didn’t even know what fossils were until probably about the 1700s. We think it’s obvious that fossils represent the remains of previously-living organisms. People just a few hundred years ago didn’t.
For that matter, one of the first fossils that was conclusively determined (afterward) to belong to a dinosaur was initially identified as the remains of a giant human - a giant human’s scrotum, actually.
I read somewhere that long ago explorers came across various reptiles whose bites felt like fire and so they returned to their homelands telling tales of fire-breathing dragons (I don’t know if it’s been said already, but doesn’t “dragon” come from a Greek word meaning lizard or something similar?) Then there was St. George and the Dragon…the first published story abotu a dragon but don’t quote me on that.
You expect someone named Darwin’s Finch in a thread like this, I suppose:
Hold on, chief. Are you saying that someone unearthing something that looks like the bones of a skeleton except made of minerals and embedded in rock would not think “Gee, it’s some kind of old skeleton”??
Not that all fossils are as transparently self-explanatory as that, but plenty of them are. Bones is bones. And big bones means big critters.
The fact of extinction was not known to people just a few hundred years ago. Thus, it was essentially inconcievable that there would be these huge bones lying around of large animals which did not now exist. Recall that religion had a very prfound influence on earlier generations, and the prevailing religion of the day in Europe and the US was, of course, Christianity - which taught 6 days of special creation, and essentially that everything that was, is.
Because of point 1, few people did readily interpret “rocks which look like bones” as bones, but rather as, well, rocks which looked like bones. A type of mimicry, if you will, exhibited by the mineral world. Early attempts at explaining evolution-like processes involved a continuum of sorts between the mineral world and the animal or vegetable world, in which rocks would “take on” the appearance of natural forms.
Dinosaur skeletons are very rarely, if ever, just lying exposed, waiting to be found. An isolated, exposed bone is usually found, and provides a clue that a skeleton lies nearby; it often involves lots of jackhammering and heavy machinery to actually expose the skeleton itself (depending on its size and the type of rock it is found in, of course).
Skulls are especially rare, and, again, almost never exposed (vertebrate fossils tend to erode away pretty quickly when exposed like that, unless they are in isolated, arid environments).
As such, I find it highly unlikely that dinosaur fossils could have served as the impetus for dragon legends. Dragon were thought to be extant creatures, presuambly, so the connection between “rock-like fossil” and “living thing” would very likely not have been made at all, much less the likelihood that entire skeletons would have been found and attributed to them.
The English word dragon is derived ultimately from Greek drakon, which goes back to about the 8th century B.C. if not earlier. Both Homer and Hesiod, two of the earliest Greek writers whose works survive, used the word.
