About Dragons...

[Japut3h]

Heres the simplest and probably the most reasonable explanation of how ancient cultures started believing in dragons:They came across the preserved dinosaur skeletons,which are large in numbers anywhere on the world.I doubt that they really saw dragon-like forms with their own eyes.Then the myth just got passed on from a culture to an another,and changed its base form a bit.

[Rakdos,Defiler]

Hey guys, it's not if Dragons existed, it's if their capabilities were plausable and could actually come from evolution. I know most of you are on topic but there has been a few...

The whole meteor thing is a theory, and to go with that theory is that it created and ice age.

I saw this video on discovery channel, and like they said, cultures all around the world that hated each other or had no contact had drawings about dragons(and aliens.) The Mayans, Aztecs, them people had drawing about them, and this was definetly way before "Christopher Colombus sailed the ocean blue."

Originally Posted by Mecheon

Conditions nowerdays don't support large animals at all, unlike the Ice Ages. All the Megafauna are long extinct, so something like a dragon, in an age where there were giant elephants with backwards tusks and other such creatures, wouldn't evolve. Reptiles had their go at ruling the world, and that ended right before the age of the Dinosaurs, with a mass extinction that wiped out 90% of life

Yeah, maybe a few could live with enough food, but they would have to be pretty much "hand fed" or else we'd kill em. Since anything that kills a human should be killed, but if a human kills an animal it's completely fine.....

[Mecheon]

Originally Posted by Hakeem

I must ask for some sources, because I understand two things:

1. Pterosaurs and birds never existed at the same time.
2. Pterosaurs had mastered flight far beyond modern birds.

You understand the wrong things

1. Birds have been around for milenia. The earlier appear in the fossil record around the Triassic. Pterosaurs were definently around then. Besides, a lot of species of dinosaurs were pretty damn bird-like, such as the raptors. Birds really took off in the Cretaceous, when the largest Pterosaurs were around
2. Not really. They were mainly gliders and weren't really designed for flapping, unlike birds today. There are some gliders still around, however nothing like Pterosaurs. Modern birds didn't really get a chance to evolve into massive gliders due to various elements, so the closest thing to them today would be an albatross

Of course my knowledge of extinct birds that aren't horrific terror birds is lacking heavily, so I wouldn't be surprised if there actually were some massive glider birds back when those continental oceans still existed

[Hakeem]

Again, I must ask for some sources.

[Mecheon]

Originally Posted by Hakeem

Again, I must ask for some sources.

Fine then

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds

I mean, seriously, even you must know about Archaeopteryx, and that was by no means the earliest of all birds, just the earliest known for many years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx

Unfortunately I can't find anything on the flight mechanics of pterosaurs, but I'm pretty sure they were nothing special. The larger ones were gliders though, with wingspans far beyond that of modern birds

[Teh_Ephy]

Sorry to jump in without reading many of the posts, but the first page took a while. I'm responding to some of the recent stuff, and woo does this post jump around a lot.

It's possible that western dragons' fire breathing was based off of Komodo dragons' bruight fiery tongues, which flicker out and could be perceived as fire. The story of "fire-breathing dragons" was brought back by explorers. I'm not sure where I heard that, but it does make sense.

As for eastern dragons, one possible origin is the giant crocodile. Also, there was some conqueror that incorporated the banners of defeated clans into his own banner, which is how they became so weird.

Also, Japut3h is exactly right about another origin of dragon myths. Skeletons and such were unearthed of dinosaurs and such, and not just in one place. Either stories/myths were created around them, or they provided evidence for existing stories.

Elenai: Kiwis and Hawks are hardly the same species of animal, although dogs were a damn good example. Also, Eastern dragons were outlandish: They had horns of a stag, the head of a camel, the eyes of a demon, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, the soles of a tiger, the ears of a cow. Try explaining that sort of diversity.

[Rakdos,Defiler]

Any wiki is NOT a resource. When will people understand that god damn, for all we know you could have put the information in. Not saying you did, but get my point?

Asian dragons are just dumb, it's impossible for them to be real, their wings were so tiny. Unless their eings had the power of a bee, which in all logic bees should not be able to fly.

I doubt every single culture found dinosaur skeletons, then started saying they were real and flew. That would be too much of a coincidence, and I don't believe in coincidences.

[Elenai]

Elenai: Kiwis and Hawks are hardly the same species of animal, although dogs were a damn good example. Also, Eastern dragons were outlandish: They had horns of a stag, the head of a camel, the eyes of a demon, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, the soles of a tiger, the ears of a cow. Try explaining that sort of diversity.

Ahh, but Kiwi's and Hawks are still "birds"

why not then could a "dragon" not have its own really diverse species?

As for the overwhelming use of..stuff..on an eastern dragon, there are several explainations.

One, they used words to describe what they thought it looked like.

Two, it was simply fanciful building on a myth, like making giant firebreathing lizards of wise and immortal, or evil and catastrophic nature, from a pterosaur like creature.

Three, they really did have similar looks....take for example the Angler Fish.

"Eyes cold as night, and empty as a void...teeth like spears, and a boney hide that could defend against all but the gods...And a magical lantern hung from its head, so it could illuminate the darkness of the hellish sea, and burn the very water and all fish who did not bow to it."

-An example of myth, drawn from real biological phenomena-

[Teh_Ephy]

Originally Posted by Rakdos,Defiler

Any wiki is NOT a resource. When will people understand that god damn, for all we know you could have put the information in. Not saying you did, but get my point?

Asian dragons are just dumb, it's impossible for them to be real, their wings were so tiny. Unless their eings had the power of a bee, which in all logic bees should not be able to fly.

I doubt every single culture found dinosaur skeletons, then started saying they were real and flew. That would be too much of a coincidence, and I don't believe in coincidences.

Please refrain from being a total dumbass. Wikipedia cites proper sources for information (and Wikipedia members totally freak out if they don't... very funny), and the information I provided had an external source at the bottom. Wikipedia is easier to say then go through and get the whole original source, which you don't have to believe any more than you need to believe Wikipedia. Wikipedia is shorter, aside from being the absolute best for general knowledge, which was all that I provided. Continuing on that note, eastern dragons don't even have wings in the first place, of course they weren't real in the way in which they are described. Like, the farther they get from home, the fewer toes they have?

And not "every single culture," which is precisely as you say too much of a coincidence, but a few early and influential cultures. For example, the Greeks found skeletons of a mammoth or something, which could be arranged to resemble massive humans. Those were the origins of local giants (or something).

Originally Posted by Elenai

Ahh, but Kiwi's and Hawks are still "birds"

I said that dogs was a good example, why can't you just leave it at that? Anyways, "birds" is a tier higher than individual species, such as kiwi and hawk, when talking about classification.

Originally Posted by Elenai

why not then could a "dragon" not have its own really diverse species?

If they can't breed with each other, then dragon becomes a class of animal, with different species within that class. You're thinking of something like different dogs such as the dachshund and doberman, and that is different breeds within one species. I never said that it wasn't possible for dragons, but eastern and western dragons are most definitely different species, and not different breed.

Originally Posted by Elenai

As for the overwhelming use of..stuff..on an eastern dragon, there are several explainations.

One, they used words to describe what they thought it looked like.

Two, it was simply fanciful building on a myth, like making giant firebreathing lizards of wise and immortal, or evil and catastrophic nature, from a pterosaur like creature.

I was just saying that eastern dragons were different from western ones...

Originally Posted by Elenai

Three, they really did have similar looks....take for example the Angler Fish.

"Eyes cold as night, and empty as a void...teeth like spears, and a boney hide that could defend against all but the gods...And a magical lantern hung from its head, so it could illuminate the darkness of the hellish sea, and burn the very water and all fish who did not bow to it."

-An example of myth, drawn from real biological phenomena-

That is the bitchin'est description of an anglerfish that I have ever heard. And I know that people described foreign creatures rather colourfully. And didn't I provide crocodiles as a possible origin of eastern dragons?

[SuPa-]

Ok, I would just like to say "WHAT THE HELL?"
I keep seeing the Discovery Channel/Animal Planet (it aired on both) Documentary pop up. That wasn't a documentary, in fact, they just did it because they could, and said it was made up. I watched it the day of the premiere, and they said all that after the mock-documentary finished

It is EXTREMELY easy to look at something and then turn it into something believable. With the knowledge we have today any scientist, if they wanted, could make a logical statement about how any mythological being/creature existed. All you need is a lot of mumbo-jumbo shit that involves a bunch of chemical reactions and specializations. But, as people have said before, that is factoring out evolution and practicality

[Teh_Ephy]

*Cough* *cough* *BOMBARDIER BEETLE* *cough*.
Shoots a spray that reaches ~ 100ºC. That temperature is achieved through a chemical reaction. It's theoretically possible that a creature very much like a dragon could have evolved, but there are big problems as to how any of those in-betweens would be useful.

[~Void~]

One theory that a chemical reaction between the dragon's saliva and platinum creates a substance that has a strong and flammable reaction to helium (in its lungs) hence breathing fire.

This may sound crazy but there is evidence of platinum deposits in the mouths of dragon corpses that were found frozen in Romania. Whether it formed naturally over time or actually was part of the dragons' fire-breathing mechanism, or whether the whole fire-breathing thing was a myth to make dragons look scary by local religious peasants it is unknown.

[Dr Super Good]

Breathing fire is hardly of use to a dragons survivability. They would not eveolve it. Rember that when things burn, they lose energy and a beast as large as a dragon would need as much food from its prey as possiable and so burning it would not be an advantage.

The only advantage flame breath would have is a defensive or asasult weapon VS humans, which as humans became a threat evolutionarily fast, they would not have enough time to evolve it. Thus flame breath would not occure on dragons.

If you want to believe in flame breath, then it would probably be some kind of magical force or spiritual thing, as I can assure you that it is as plausable to believe in that kind of stuff as dragons naturally evolving, let alone evolving fire breath.

[Hakeem]

Originally Posted by Dr Super Good

Breathing fire is hardly of use to a dragons survivability. They would not eveolve it. Rember that when things burn, they lose energy and a beast as large as a dragon would need as much food from its prey as possiable and so burning it would not be an advantage.

A dragons fire breath would only really be used to fight a danger, not for hunting.
Also, think of when a dragon is very young, and vulnerable. Wouldn't it be a good way to help it survive if it could scare predators with fire?

[Teh_Ephy]

It would certainly be great fodder for myths.