re: #242 Alouette

You may want to consider this rebuttal to LVQ’s post.

re: #95 Red Pencil

Minor quibbles: Asian dragons do have wings. And winged “thunderbirds” (which at least have some dragon characteristics) show up in Alaskan totem poles as well as Southwestern Amerind art.

[Link: en.wikipedia.org…]

And yes there were dragons of a sort in GrecoRoman mythology. That’s why we have a constellation named “Draco”.

There is some evidence that winged dragon legends worldwide ARE in fact traceable to dinosaurs —- but that these legends come from observations made in the fossil record and not “real time”. There is speculation that the Native American legend of the Thunderbird comes from a fossil pterodactyl suddenly revealed after a rain/lightning storm. And the “dragon bones” of Chinese medicine are in fact fossil bones (of almost anything including various dinosaurs), so clearly the Chinese also linked dragons to fossils. The shape of a pterodactyl’s wings are more suggestive than many other fossils would be, and might form the basis of many myths and legends, without having to believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

I have always been curious about St George’s dragon. The older medieval images seem to show the dragon as smaller (or at least no bigger) than George, which if the artists were trying to aggrandize their saint (as is normal) seems odd. I have wondered if St George’s dragon in particular (a legend of the East brought West by the Crusaders) might in fact be an “artist’s rendering” from a traveler’s tale of a Komodo “dragon” or some similar non-fossil species. Probably quite an OLD traveler’s tale, as the story of St George seems like a rehash of Perseus & Andromeda.

Image: st_george.gif
Image: dragon.jpg