I agree with the Raisin's posts, because it makes sense. Fossils are found everywhere.

So some dumb shit peasent from ancient greenland finds a skull of a monolophosaurus and starts wigging out, yelling "DRAGON! DRAGON!" He alerts the other villagers with his high-pitched crying and they see the skull and go into a panic with him. Later on, more people find these fossils and start making stupid fairy tales like they liked to do. So badda bing, we have Dragons. The creations of a frightened and simple people.

What about the religous part you've practiclly* gone and said the chinese are stupid make beleive sad-os

The fact we label something "dragon" doesn't make it so. Hundreds of years ago, if we'd shown a European "dragon" to someone living in the Orient, they'd have asked what planet we were on as it wouldn't be a "dragon" to them.

And just because something shows up in cultures across the world doesn't mean it existed - Gideon Mantle may have been one of the first people to ever DEFINE a dinosaur, but just because they didn't call it a dinosaur doesn't mean the bones didn't exist. If you're brought up in a world where God created everything and the earth is only a few thousand years old, and you find the bones of a giant animal that no longer exists, with giant jaws and horns and spikes and other nasties, and what other explanation for it must there be aside from "dragons"?

Something like a dragon would have been utterly unable to fly. Full stop. No questions. Watch a swan trying to take off, then scale it up a few notches. It's all to do with a power:weight ratio, and dragons would have WAAY exceeded the maximum. The larger you get, the bigger muscles you need to fly - which makes you heavier, so you need bigger muscles, which makes you heavier, so you need bigger muscles... If dragons ever existed they'd be either tiny little creatures, or like a pterosaur.

The only halfway convincing story about the existance of dragons I've seen is one that states they live on an alternate plane of reality - like the Astral plane or whatever you choose to call it - where laws of physics don't exist.

- I think I've seen it. It's a clever book, but it doesn't present itself as anything other than a piece of fiction. It's a bit like "the Future is Wild" - and I so badly want to kill the producers of that program (Hopping snails? Big old bit of WTF-ery) - could be believed as it's convincingly presented, but it doesn't make it real.

On a related note, last night there was a Docu-drama on Channel 4 called "the Last Dragons" or something, which was a fictional account of a researcher who found dragon corpses in a Himalayan (or something) cave frozen like mammoths, and so proved (in a fictional setting) they existed. It was a very clever piece of television, and spoke of dragons having hydrogen reserves to allow them to breathe fire and fly, but still never tried to be "real".

Yay. I like dragons (well, I liked them better until EVERYONE seemed to be a dragon, and they became cutesy-poo fluffy defenders of the environment and all the rest of the lovely world, and wouldn't hurt a fly! Unless in righteous indignation) but do they exist? Not on this world.

Alpha, Chinese dragons are completely diffrent then the dragons we are talking about here and you know it.

LMAO. Hydrogen reserves. They would be in constant danger of blowing themselves to hell. Nature rarely makes something so stupid, and when it does, it doesn't last very long. The exception, of course, being humans. :fuzgrin:

Teal, I so know what you mean about "well, I liked them better until EVERYONE seemed to be a dragon, and they became cutesy-poo fluffy defenders of the environment and all the rest of the lovely world, and wouldn't hurt a fly! Unless in righteous indignation". That ticks me off. Where do they come up with this stuff? It's like using "angel" to refer to something as being all sweet and kind and whatnot. Show me one verse in the Bible that describes angels like that. Ya can't.