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.
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The dragonoloy book I got gives planty of proof of real dragons buy it and you'll see.
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- 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.