4 ms·
I have no idea where dragon myths or giant myths originate; giants are easy to guess, but dragons are a strangely common belief for creatures with so little bas
by clock_tower 10y ago
I have no idea where dragon myths or giant myths originate; giants are easy to guess, but dragons are a strangely common belief for creatures with so little basis in reality. (Plasma cosmology has a very interesting explanation for dragons, and for a lot of other strange things in human history, but the physics of that theory are pretty bad.) I'm just mentioning what it is that dinosaur bones were identified with in the Middle Ages -- centuries before anyone knew that there had ever been such things as dinosaurs.
(To an extent, dragons fall into the same category as unicorns, griffins, and phoenixes: not mythology so much as really bad zoology. All four of these species were believed to exist in the real world as contemporaries of medieval humanity, sometimes surprisingly nearby -- like griffins in the Caucasus.)