Could dragons really exist?

[ThatBrightHelper]

I am friends with someone of viking descent, and she told me that her ancestors were friends with dragons, just like How To Train Your Dragon! I find that really cool that dragons might not be that imaginary.

Yes and unicorns too!
The ' legends ' must have come from somewhere ?

Seem perfectly reasonable that the aliens could have brought dragons with them

I think it is absolutely plausible that there were once dragons.

We had dinosaurs who flew.... This would account for dragons.

But as far as I am aware there was no human/dinosaur overlap so how would humans know about them?

Bones.

I always wonder why people think a kid would get a day off school and immediately fire up Mumsnet to troll middle aged women. As if!

Excellent film made about this a few years ago by Channel 4 - I actually showed clips to GCSE Biology classes.

Ruminants produce methane from the bacteria in their digestive tracts, birds have grit in their crops to grind up seeds, so a possible ignition source.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dragon_(2004_film)

@BeCyanSloth Thats exactly the type of dragon I want! Should there be two hatchlings next year, I’d be more than happy to take one off your hands. Obviously subject to home inspection, can’t be rehoming dragons to just anyone.

Because it’s a more likely scenario than an adult of either sex spouting some of the nonsense on here?

See also the current thread where someone who claims to be a 31 year old man is refusing to put down his wife’s name as next of kin on forms for a new job, because once, when he was 17, his then boss called his mother to complain about his workplace performance.

It’s preferable to think that’s from a schoolchild bunking off than that there’s an actual 31 year old man who thinks that putting his wife’s number on a personnel form for work means his boss can call her to complain.

Who cares? This is a GREAT question if you are 6 or 60.

You mean fossils?

Don't you know that Dragon Rescues are run by Dragon hoarding weirdos whose only goal in life is to prevent perfect homes from getting a dragon?
Thats why people buy them from t'internet or "rescue" from abroad.

He has posted before, unfortunately he may well be real
Americans innit

Ah they’ll be the Vikings that settled in Scotland rather than Wales then ;)

I've always loved dragons and I love how every culture has its own 'dragon' specific to the region. As pp's have noted in most cultures they don't fly, thats very much the western dragon.

I'm sure fossils have played a big part in shaping the myths, but how complete is the fossil record? Fossils only form in specific environments, I doubt what we have seen is even 10% of the wildlife that existed at those time points.

Yes dragons are real!

There was an amazing cartoon in the 80s where the dragons fly by eating limestone and swallowing gems (treasure hoarding) to break the limestone up in the stomach and creating hydrogen gas. The gas made them fly like a blimp, and they breathed it out to come down.

Many modern-day descendants of Vikings have a long tradition of story-telling.
Its difficult to imagine that the truth was passed down exactly for generations, or that people with an aptitude for entertainment and drama didn’t add their own spin onto these stories when telling them to people, E.g. their children, to keep them amused. Some children would have relayed these ales with their own embellishments, I’m sure!
Beowulf is one such story - pretty sure that among all the “normal” drama of family fallouts and wars, there is a monster - Grindel rings a bell…

In short, no, dragons (with four legs and two wings) couldn't exist from a biological standpoint. All terrestrial vertebrates evolved from a lobed-finned fish with four limbs. For a creature to spontaneously evolved another pair of limbs would be a huge evolutionary jump that we have never seen.

Wyverns (two legs and two wings), on the other hand, are more plausible. Creatures like Quetzalcoatlus show that large, winged vertebrates existed. However, a real wyvern wouldn’t resemble the traditional fantasy depiction. It would need to be much smaller and lighter to achieve flight.

I think that Grendel is actually the result of The King getting jiggy with something that may have been a dragon of some kind (in disguise one hopes).
Its probably allegorical

Well that be a great theory but of course the gas you can get out of limestone is carbon dioxide so this putative dragon could only serve as a fire extinguisher, not a flamethrower.😂

https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/dragons/id1537788786?i=1000659200634]]

Have you not see the film "1 Million Years BC"?

Surely you mean The Documentary 1 million years BC?

of course.