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I’ll let you in on a secret—they are real.
Well, sort of. It all comes down to words. As humans, we use words to name things. A table wouldn’t be called a table, for instance, if some person hadn’t named it that thousands of years ago.
If I asked you to tell me about dragons, to describe the things that define them, I’ll bet you would tell me they’re huge, nasty, scaly monsters with four legs, wings, and a tail, and most importantly, they have the ability to breathe fire, right? The word “dragon” comes from the ancient Greek word “drakon” which meant “serpent” or “big snake.” We all know snakes don’t fly or breathe fire or have legs, but over the centuries, that word morphed into the Old French word “dragon” and was used to describe the mythical beasts we all think of when we hear that word today.
Now if we look at the fossils of extinct animals, we see that millions of years ago, some dinosaurs lived in what is now Europe. Even though we’ve only really been aware of what they represent for about 175 years, fossils have been in the ground and occasionally getting exposed by erosion for as long as people have existed.
So if a person in Europe in the 1300s saw what we would now call fossilized Baryonyx bones exposed in a hillside, what would they call it? We think that most, if not all, dragon myths came from the discovery and misinterpretation of fossils from dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.
Here are the facts we know: We’ve never seen an animal skeleton, past or present, with four legs and wings. Real animals either have wings or front legs/arms, but not both. We’ve never seen an animal that could breathe fire. It sounds really cool, but it just doesn’t exist anywhere in nature, and there’s nothing to suggest it ever did. There are fossils of extinct creatures that look similar to the dragons that ancient legends describe, but they lack the real defining characteristics of dragons.
So what do you call dragons with no wings, four legs, long tails and no ability to breathe fire? Today, we call them dinosaurs, and we study their fossil clues to help us learn more about them.
By the way, even though we often hear that cultures around the world had dragon myths, that’s not entirely true. Dragon stories are really only found in parts of Europe and Asia. And Asian dragons? They’re not really dragons. Most Asian dragon stories involve creatures with long, serpentine bodies, short reptilian legs, and big heads. They fly or float, but they don’t have wings. They’re associated with luck and the forces of nature and are generally not thought of as monsters. In China, they were called “long” or “lung” until Europeans saw depictions of them and called them dragons. So while we find stories of mythical creatures everywhere on the planet, we can’t really call them all dragons.
Looking for more Never Stop Asking "Why?" questions? Catch up on all of the past "Why's" on the blog!
