Please read notes and comments first as it may answer your question. I have been bombarded by this question lately. The flying, fire breathing reptile that has been manifested by mankind is not real. Pterosaur or Pterodactyl could have manifested in dreams or visions in the days of old and created a lot of these beliefs or superstitions as well. In his 1982 book, The Encyclopedia of Monsters, Daniel Cohen traced the word draco to ancient Latin. To the Romans this word referred to any giant snake, such as a python from India or Africa. This usage was enshrined by the naturalist Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, wherein he based his description upon travellers' tales and thus exaggerated the size of these snakes. Pliny's work became a standard reference for centuries to follow.The dragon myth was further established by the King James Bible, which uses the words "serpent", "dragon" and "Devil" in a fairly interchangeable manner. Including dragons in the Holy Bible cemented their existence as widely-accepted fact, but it also laid the groundwork for the dragon as a "supernatural" monster rather than merely an oversized snake. Cohen suggests that the dragon's other distinguishing attributes, ". . . the legs, the wings, the ability to breath fire . . . seem to have been added bit by bit over the centuries by people who thought that a simple snake, no matter how large, was not a sufficient symbol of pure evil."Cohen takes care to note that the western dragon myth and the oriental lung or lóng have quite different characteristics and origins, and these did not become conflated together under the "dragon" name until relatively recent times. Likewise, he dismissed any connection between dinosaurs and dragons as a modern contrivance, although acknowledging that fossilized bones of various extinct animals may have helped foster the oriental dragon myth.Carl Sagan hypothesized in his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden that the myth of dragons arose from the innate fear of reptiles that we share with other mammals, a remnant of the time when mammals lived with dinosaurs.Dinosaur and mammalian fossils were occasionally mistaken for the bones of dragons and other mythological creature; for example, a discovery in 300 B.C. in Wucheng, Sichuan, China, was labeled as such by Chang Qu. Adrienne Mayor has written on the subject of fossils as the inspiration for myths in her book The First Fossil Hunters, and in an entry in the Encyclopedia of Geology she wrote: "Fossil remains generated a variety of geomyths speculating on the creatures identity and cause of their destruction. Many ancient cultures, from China and India to Greece, America, and Australia, told tales of dragons, monsters, and giant heroes to account for fossils of animals they had never seen alive."

Channel: Education
Uploaded: October 16, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Author: atomarane

Length: 09:49
Rating: 4.06383
Views: 17678

Tags: Dragons  Dragon  Mythology  Pterosaur  Pterodactyl  Monsters  Reptilian  

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