On today's Moment of Science, we're going to talk about dragons. This might seem like an inappropriate topic for a science program, but there are stories and myths about dragons from everywhere in the world, from Europe to China to Australia to the Americas.

There is at least a remote possibility that there is some reality behind these myths, and that dinosaurs have inspired these stories. Of course, dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and the earliest human ancestors didn't appear until about 3 million years ago. No human ancestor could have ever seen a dinosaur.

Even if humans never saw a living dinosaur, however, they might have seen their bones. In a book published in 2000, research scholar Adrienne Mayor argued that since the bones of giant prehistoric animals were abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans, ancient fossil finds might have inspired some of their stories of monsters, giants and dragons.

We also know that in the 4th century BC, a Chinese scholar identified dinosaur bones as those of a dragon.

Dragon myths might also have been inspired by modern animals. The Nile crocodile, which is native to sub-Saharan Africa, can grow to 18 feet in length. It sometimes walks like a dragon, with its trunk raised off the ground.

If stories about this animal reached Italy or Greece in ancient times, it might have inspired western dragon myths. Sailors returning from Indonesia with stories about dragons were inspired by the Komodo dragon, a type of monitor lizard that can reach ten feet in length.

Another type of large monitor lizard might have inspired dragon stories among Australian aboriginals.

Read More

• Were Unicorns Real?
• Fossils Of The Future
• Death By Thirst: The Last Of The Woolly Mammoths

Source

• Radford, B. A Brief History of the Mythical, Fire-Breathing Beasts. Live Science, April 11, 2019.