did dragons exist?
and before you stop reading just think about it, they are the most popular mythical creature, they COULD possibly existed because they are correlated to lizards and we also know that some dinosarus were winged.
eastern folklore actually take dragons seriously, i mean if dragons are bullshit then why they have so many stories about them
>>17185093
Definitely. They still exist somewhere.
>>17185093
I believe there are still many unexplored animals out there.
I also believe that life is teaming throughout the universe because that's what many near death experiencers say.
>>17185093
Dragons do just not the flying firebreathing type pictured.
Could a flying lizard-like creature exist. Possibly, supposely fossils show such a creature.
Fire breathing ones, highly unlikely.
>>17185093
The folklore about dragons most likely have their origin in dinosaurs.
People all around the world found dinosaur bones in the ground. Putting those bones together, the image of dragons was created.
>>17185093
Long time ago people found dinosaur bones and came up with dragons to explain them.
>>17185093
A giant (realistic, not GIANT) winged dinosaur, a living fossil of modern birds, could have survived the extinction event in small populations. It could be that early humans of many cultures had run-ins and eventually they went extinct. Obviously we have not found the fossils, but that's not to say they might not be out there.
I would totally have a threesome with a T-Rex and a dragon.
>>17185093
A dragon is the equivalent of a flying Tyrannosaurus. Imagine, if you will, that it did exist. With the advantage of flight, it would have obviously dominated the animal kingdom, and would have been a wide-spread apex predator. Guess what? There would have been fossil evidence. Also, if it were a dinosaur, it would have been feathered.
In any case, I recommend that OP checks this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnt5wIVjFS0
And werewolves and vampires have a lot of stories about them as well. I dare you to find reasonable proof that either of those exist.
>>17185093
Someone once mentioned this
>16th century or how long ago
>be dirt farmer
>dig and find dinosaur bones
>scream for a dragon hunter
>Megalania(possibly)
>Komodo Dragon
>Crocs
>Gators
Maybe people just exagerated what was already there.
>>17185553
>if it were a dinosaur, it would have been feathered.
nuh uh
>>17185093
Dragons DO exist, they're just a lot smaller than you'd think.
>>17188176
They have a specialized diet
>>17188207
>>17188214
maybe.
could have been a lot of this though
>>17188226
A Satan just sounds so different than an Alligator...
People in medieval times found the bones of dinosaurs and made up dragons, that's how they came into peoples minds
>>17188176
Oh, God. I want one.
Can we make them bigger?
>>17188260
With the power of science probably.
>i mean if dragons are bullshit then why they have so many stories about them
Dragons are symbolic. They are a combination of two symbols, the serpent or snake, and wings.
The serpent is one of the most ancient symbols that can be found throughout the world in many civilizations, notably Summeria thousands of years ago.
Wings traditionally represent an elevation to god-like power in might or mind, while the serpent can represent primal life or wisdom as well.
Dragons seen in medieval mythology are of a different kind, often symbolic of greed and lethargy, hording treasures and maidens of no use to them.
People's obsessions with dragons probably came from the fact that a large serpent with wings would have both ground and air superiority making it an apex predator.
There's a cool mockumentary that treats dragons as a possibility.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9myFB23W0U
>>17188296
*not
>>17188252
Unless their wings were of some type of skin that could not be fossilized.
>plot twist, most dinosaurs were dragons but wings were not preserved
>boneless structured feathered wings
>six-limbed vertebrate
Not even once.
However, it's possible that there were once moderately large lizards that migrated into Europe from western Asia in recent history due to some unforeseen environmental pressures. Natural predators, human hunters, and the mini-ice age killed them off.
>>17189768
Biologist fag here. Can confirm. This guy know his shit. Also, a fuckton of time passed, symbolism and the natural tendency of the human mind to exaggerate and create spoops (look at /x/), probably dragons (or what one would call a dragon) existed or still exists, but without the bullshit around them.
>>17185093
Dragons were mistaken dinosaur bones. Just an old word for dinosaurs.
Imagine finding a 6ft long skull with huge teeth.
Yeah but not in the way you think.
The dragons you think of are largely exaggerated, portrayed to be more badass than what they actually are.
>>17188226
Sometimes I wonder if the realistic origin of mythical creatures aren't more interesting than the possibility of them existing.
A European travelling to North Africa would be quite surprised by crocodiles, leading to rumors of living dragons. Unicorns too could come from rhinos sightings in Africa as well, or even albino deer or goats in Europe. it's interesting to see how the mind fills in gaps when it encounters something exotic or rare.
>>17185093
oddly, and probably not by coincidence, why would the same mythologicsl beast appear in the mythos of almost all civilizations, all around the world?
>>17185093
No. You are retarded; and also probably some kind of furfag dragon-kin homosexual.
Not one post about this.
Look up the Roman Draco, also a few other civilisation used them or got inspired by them
Basically it was used to determine the wind/speed for their advancing armies ended up becoming a symbol of something to fear during the Roman invasions/colonisation of Europe, later entering myth and legend
There is honestly e theory that says dragons were dinos that didn't go extinct
but there's probably a lot of mythologization to it still
like spewing fire? probably just had a hot stinky breath
And i doubt they got as big as some of the stories say
If there were dragons in recent times, such as the medieval ages, then where are the remains?
>>17192222
in the museums dipshit
>>17192230
>>17191940
Because they found dinosaur bones and didn't know what else to think of them
>>17185093
Into another dimension.
>>17189768
But muh wyverns.
>>17193379
The yi qi fossils were recently discovered in asia. They were small but obviouslyou only one species of a larger phylum we have yet to learn more about. You're welcome.
>>17185093
>did they
probably not
>could they
actually yes they tested it
>>17191616
This.
Also most actual folklore, at least in Europe, describes dragons as just big-ass snakes or very similar to crocodiles. South American stories are of feathered serpents, in line with modern views of avian dinosaurs.
Aborigines have a story of bunyips and when shown dinosaur bones and pictures of dinosaurs existing only in the Australian mega fauna they say it was exactly those. Dinosaurs were alive with humans for short periods of time and it is believed the aborgines hunted them to extinction like mammoths were.
>>17185093
Flying lizard like creatures did infact exist yes. Did they breathe fire? No. Can Dragon's exist in some other dimension? Sure.
>>17188402
The Sumerian serpent was a serpent-man, and flying represents actual flight in air/ space craft which had weapons, or 'breathed fire'.
The tradition of hoarding gold in dungeons would also tie in to the Sumerian legend that we were created by them to mine GOLD and legends from various cultures all over the world of lizard men living in networks of deep, ancient tunnels.
>>17185538
I love the random interjections of /b/tards
>>17188226
Kek
Why do Chinese dragons look so different to European dragons?
>>17187776
Yes uh
>>17185567
This. The legend of the cyclops started in the exact same way after Greeks found wooly mammoth skulls, can't see why this didn't happen with dragons/dinosaurs too. Sorry OP but we all have to grow up sooner or later.
Pic related it's a mammoth/"cyclops" skull, minus the tusks.
>>17193991
So close anon, you were almost right. The dinosaurs when extinct millions of years before even our most rudimentary ancesters evolved, so there is absolutely no overlap between dinosaurs and modern humans. Obviously, none of the aboriginals alive today ever saw a "bunyip" or megafauna with their own eyes and had only ancestral stories of them to know what they looked like. So naturally when you show a picture of a big, scary reptile-thing that was extinct long before we climbed out of our trees to them they'll go "yes that's a bunyip!" since, again, they've never actually seen one and only have oral legends as a point of reference.
Gud tri tho m8e
>>17194076
How come Egypt has pictures depicting them ?
No records of fossils being found were ever recorded.
>>17193991
Megalania more likely. Basically a komodo dragon the length of a bus that lived in the pleistocene, during the age of man.
>>17194022
European be Asian depictions of lions, for comparison
>>17194185
Vs
>>17185093
>they are correlated to lizards
>correlated
Stopped reading right there.
>>17194201
European lions are derpy as fuck man
>>17185093
Anybody here happen to know why Dragons in folklore and fairy tales are depicted as hoarding treasure or keeping princesses prisoner in abandoned castles?
Did they eat the treasure? How the hell did they keep the princesses they imprisoned alive?
>>17194256
Greed, my dear boy. Dragons were associated with the devil, and sin by association. Stealing princesses was symbolism for lust and the urge to defile the pure.
>>17194276
by extension
>>17189286
I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS FOR YEARS THANK YOU SO MUCH
>>17194246
Yeah the Chinese one too. Fufk is fucking cross eyed.
>>17194022
The ancient chinese had a big thing for snakes. The goddess that supposedly created people in their mythology was half snake, half human.
The chinese dragon is a totemized snake with elements from other animals that they just found cool, and decided to incorporate. There's also a species of alligator living in china and it may have partially served as inspiration to the chinese dragon as well.
>>17189622
Just breed them for size and in a few generations they'll start noticeably being bigger.
I wouldn't worry about it
>>17194097
>How come Egypt has pictures depicting them ?
Pictures depicting what? Dragons? Probably because they stumbled across dino bones and took it from there
> No records of fossils ever being recorded
Honestly what the fuck are you even talking about?
>>17194185
The fuck were these guys smoking?
>>17194992
Opium?
>>17194992
Salvia Divinorum, a schedule 1 narcotic and illegal in more than 40 states and 200 countries
As one Ohio lawmaker put it "It's a dangerous hallucinogenic drug. As soon as I found out about it, that night, I started writing the bill to criminalize it. I thought, it's a hallucinogen, it's available to the public, it's available to children, it needs to be illegal." [sic]
>>17195009
No, opium is a sedative. It makes you dream.
The joke about the elephant is a reference to the primary Hindu god, Ganesh, who was born into the body of a man but later realized that he was really an elephant
>>17195017
He said as he sipped from his second glass of brandy for the evening
>>17194022
Umm, for the same general reasons Chinese humans look so different from European humans???
>>17195039
Oh well alcohol does whatever you want
It's a real miracle. Without it, I'd still be screaming at my parents in a feeble attempt to get them to acknowledge my suffering :^)
What is a dragon?
Is it a winged lizard like a european dragon? Is it a giant snake like the Norse one?
There are probably a lot of animals our ancestors dealt with in the 100000 years before history that no longer exist and that we haven't found fossils for. There's probably an anaconda in South America that's big enough to call a dragon right now.
>>17195033
>Ganesh, who was born into the body of a man but later realized that he was really an elephant
Where are you getting this story?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythological_anecdotes_of_Ganesha
Not from any of this.
>>17195017
Nah, a lion under Salvia would look more like this
>>17191754
I agree anon
>>17185093
Apply that logic to super heroes.
>there's LOTS of stories about them
>They MUST be real!
See how silly that is? Don't go full "ancient aliens" on us and assume something is real because of fictional stories and folk lore.
Ancient humans may have known less of the world than us, but their need for entertainment was the same as ours. Only, instead of serialized TV shows and movies, they had folk tales that got told for centuries, by word of mouth, and were reputed to be true tales in order to get people more into it.
That's actually not that uncommon in modern culture either. Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is "based on tre events" when all teydid was VERY vaguely base one element of Leather face's design off of a erial killer.
Or how The Fourth kind is "based on true events" but said events were actually solved, didn't involve aliens, and was more or less about drunken sailors going missing (lol).
Just because "it's TRUE!" does NOT mean it's literally real, anon. Truth and reality are two very different things.
>>17185093
Fucking Jedi is a real religion now. That doesn't make lightsaber wielding assholes in space real...
>>17185093
Not just are dragons real but there's dragons that breathe all kinds of things like frost dragons, thunder dragons and even cum dragons.
>>17192219
>And i doubt they got as big as some of the stories say
This. If you look up pictures of St.George you'll find all of the dragons are about the size of his horse at the largest which is realistic for a crocodile or other large lizard.
>>17185489
That really makes the most sense.
>>17195061
Thats the most stupid reason i've ever read. Are you american?
>>17195533
what if its in a galaxy far far away
>>17185489
>>17185567
>>17194037
These niggers know.
Dragon formula:
1 portion of folkore memory of now extinct fauna that co-existed with ancestral humans (elephant, mammoth, rhino, giant sloth - delete as geographically appropriate)
1 portion of finding huge bones of these, of dinosaurs, Mesozoic marine reptiles, even unrelated objects like Belemnites which resemble huge pointed teeth...
>9000 portions of human imagination from peoples who didnt even know such animals as elephants and rhinos existed, never mind dinos etc...
1 portion of only having superstitious/religious based explanations for the world in which people once lived
= 1 dragon + many, MANY other strange folkloric creatures
Sadly, there are no large higher-vertebrate cryptids out there - very soon even the familiar stuff will be extinct in the wild, never mind anything larger and rarer: there are critical minimum population sizes below which extinction is inevitable.
>>17195523
underrated post
All it would take for some animal to breathe fire is a ability to produce and oily substance. Like whale fat is flammable. They burn that stuff. Then maybe 2 bones in the jaw or neck that hit like flint to produce a spark
>>17196651
Put the spliff down and go to bed, Little Billy.
>>17194992
Keep in mind whoever drew that has never seen a lion. Someone long ago might've seen one, gave a half assed verbal description of it which someone else based their picture of a lion on, and then people from hundreds or even thousands of years down the road would just copy from one another.
If the european version of the dragon is based on anything in real life, like dinosaur bones, the same thing would have happened and this is why you end up with a giant thing with wings and breathes fires.
>>17194421
is this why the nips like tentacles
>>17196782
No. Nips are just Nips.
>>17195033
there are multiple different stories of Ganesh getting the elephant head, yours is not one of them.
My roughly put together theory
>tall whites ruled the earth
>Nords race killed the dragon race (reptilians)
>dinosaour bones and giant human bones are the only evidence of the great war
>Nazis made a agreement with tall whites to stop capital lizard leaders and rule the earth once again
>dragon dildos become a thing
>>17189643
The legendary european gigantic firebreathing dragons we see in popular culture would be biomechanically impossible. The amount of lift required would mean jet engines or rocket engines, no wing structure could ever work.
>>17196803
oh my god dragons were just alien spaceships
>>17196801
You too, step away from the ganj and go to bed.
>>17185093
>thread about dragons
>OP posts a wyvern
t. /tg/
>>17195544
what does exactly happen when a sperm dragon fights an ovum dragon?
>>17197896
You get the most autistic creation myth ever imagined.
>>17198159
An idea so spergy it kinda deserves its own L Ron Hubbard...
dragons were just a derivative of the reptilian humanoids, used as war beasts and construction workers
probably some left hiding out in the tunnels or in the hollow earth among the reptilians
the nordics killed nearly all of them and banished them from the surface, luckily they couldn't help their dicks and bred with all the local monkey girls and created us; who are their loyal slaves
>>17185093
reminder that in some cultures giant sea turtles are considered dragons, and to them dragons still exist very much.
>>17191754
It's not really even up for debate about the unicorns/rhinos thing, it's straight up from Pliny describing rhinos on his visits to Africa.
I saw a blue dragon outside my house. It looked like a snake floating in the air. Bro took some pics but its on his memory card.
>>17198846
In 3rd grade I knew a kid who said shit like that every day
>>17185093
technically theres nothing new under the sun so idk where the idea came froom
>>17198807
That is one of the most common explanations, yes, but it's not the only one.
>>17196782
cthulu monster genetic memories
>>17185093
No, Dino would be the closest thing.
Dragons are mythical. The Chinese basically invented them. Let's say your clan mascot was a snake and you took over a new region/clan. That clan has a tiger as their mascot. You take the claws of the tiger and add them to your mascot, thus indicating you took over that clan.
And so on until it looks even more like a dragon.
>>17199290
>The Chinese basically invented them
Yeah, the South Americans and Aborigines stole dragon mythology from the Chinese
>>17185093
I believe fire-breathing is probably a fantasy aspect added (Notice how stories usually emphasize that it's specifically a fire-breathing dragon? If all dragons were magical, it would likely have just been "dragon." I mean unless they, even in times where stories of them were common, were very rare sites in which case many may not have known whether or not they could be capable of such things. Something born of exaggeration.
I've looked at some articles that try to dissect the science behind a possible firebreathing creature (I mean, some animals can do weirder things IMO) but I still find it unlikely. Lightening I believe. Maybe even water. Fire? Ehh..
I don't know if they still exist. If they do, it's likely legends of them sleeping for hundreds of years could be true which would explain why no one has found one in any recent centuries. You do hear stories of people going into unexplored caves and leaving when they hear strange, deafening roars. If any of them thought to say "dragon" would it fit?
>>17185093
>people back in the day find dinosaur bones
>people start making tales about dragons
it's really not hard to figure out why dragons are a thing.
>>17198861
Mental illness is a tragedy to its sufferers and loved ones.
Fucking hilarious to the rest of us of course...
Regarding fire-breathing European dragons, I recall reading somewhere that this was likely caused by people misinterpreting depictions of large monitor lizards from Africa.
Monitor lizards have forked tongues, and so artists depicting them would give them two pronged tongues. Later artists see these depictions and copy them without ever seeing the actual animal, and not knowing any better start to give the tongues three prongs, then four prongs, and then five prongs, and so on. Eventually, the forked tongue becomes a mass of flicks spewing from the jaws that looks a lot more like fire than a tongue, and now you've got stories spreading about fire-breathing dragons.
