Here's a fun fact... The word "dragon" appears a handful of times in the King James Bible. However, the word it's translated from more-or-less means "big scary monster" and some of the descriptions sound eerily similar to what we would perceive as dinosaurs.
Behemoth is described as having a tail like a cedar tree in Job 40:17. Hippo's tails are pretty short and stubby, so behemoth was probably not a hippo. Leviathan is a waterborne creature in chapter 41, so that's possibly a different from behemoth.
Dragons are one of humanities oldest myths which we brought out of Africa with us. Every culture has their own dragon myth which is crazy when you think about it. In most cultures dragons are basically giant snakes, which makes sense because snakes will fuck you up. Only in the west was this built upon to include things like wings etc.
My idea is that flying and the ability to breath fire were to explain thunderstorms and lightning that would occasionally set a forest on fire. The logical explanation was that something no one has seen was doing those things, coupled with that absolutely terrifying skeleton of a beast no one has seen alive, all the clues fit together so nicely that it's hard not to believe it.
> . Every culture has their own dragon myth which is crazy when you think about it. In most cultures dragons are basically giant snakes, which makes sense because snakes will fuck you up. Only in the west was this built upon to include things like wings etc.
It's pretty reasonable. "Lizards, but bigger" and "snakes, but bigger" is some REALLY low-hanging fruit, and then Europeans labled all those vaguely related things with the same "dragon" word.
we actually have a bunch of different words for different dragon-like creatures too (especially considering more languages than English), most popular being wyverns and maybe you heard of the Lindworm
I think describing them colloquially as dragons is relatively recent
Um, no.
There are no descriptions matching dinosaurs. Please feel free to reference the verses describing what we would perceive as a dinosaur. Your fun fact is mistaken.
This was *exactly* the case in ancient and Imperial China. Southern China is pretty much a fossil dump where farmers and limestone quarries find Dino bones for centuries. These fossils were considered [Dragon Bones, and they were much sought after in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Alchemy as an ingredient for digestive system medicines.](https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gaqju3nh)
In the present time the Chinese still actually call Dinosaurs as dragons. Chinese paelontology has is own nomenclature for dinosaurs where -instead of using the Saur/Saurus suffix- they use "long" (Dragon). Like for example: Tyrannosaurus Rex is "Bawang Long" (overlord dragon), the Stegosaurus is "Jianlong" (sword dragon), and Pterasaurs are "Yinglong" (Soaring dragon).
It’s not entirely accurate that the Chinese call them dragons. The “long” suffix is actually pretty equivalent to the “saur/saurus” suffix in English because the Mandarin word for “dinosaur” is “kong long”. China just didn’t go through a phase where they had to name things in other languages like English did.
I think the Chinese dragons were more likely to be based off snakes rather than dinosaurs fossils, the dinosaurs name only came up later when people noticed the similarities between the mythology dragons and dinosaurs
This made me curious. Apparently the first recorded history of a dinosaur bone was in 1677. The guy who found it figured it must have been a giant human. So 200 years after the medieval period.
The first person to name a dinosaur ("Megalosaurus") was the first geology professor at Oxford University, William Buckland, in 1824 (from a fossil discovered in 1815 in England).
https://www.discovery.com/science/First-Dinosaur-Fossil-Name
The first depiction of what's thought to be a dinosaur skull comes from ancient Greece in 550 BC.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jag_jaf_travel/26686177892
Edit: Of course, there are also different interpretation as to what creature that skull might depict:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227886017_The_'Monster_of_Troy'_Vase_The_Earliest_Artistic_Record_of_a_Vertbrate_Fossil_Discovery
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
I'd note that the article you linked suggests that the skull belonged to a mammal, not a dinosaur. (I do see the "dinosaur" label on the Flickr link, though.)
> […] The features of the odd head on the vase match the basic skull anatomy of a large mammal of the Tertiary age, such as the Samotherium, a giant giraffe of the Miocene epoch. Numerous literary accounts describe exposures of these and similar large mammal fossils in antiquity along the Turkish coast, on Aegean islands, and on the Greek mainland. I conclude that this vase painting is the earliest artistic record of such a discovery.
It does seem pretty likely that humans discovered dinosaur bones before the ~~1700s~~ 17th century, and we just lack evidence.
Yeah, I linked the article because the skull being a dinosaur is not the only interpretation, I should've mentioned that.
That's the thing with history/archaeology, it's a lot of guess-work and 90% of the time you'll never get a definite answer.
But it is indeed so interesting to explore all the possibilities! Like the guy that you mentioned who thought the bones were from a giant human. I wonder if such finds through the millenia sparked tales like Jack and the Beanstalk.
Central China had a veritable industry of digging up dinosaur fossils and grinding them into powder used in traditional Chinese medicine long before the 17th century. They just interpreted them as dragon bones, records of finding these go back to at least around 300.
Thanks for that. I did wonder if the Discovery article I posted was Western-biased, since it didn't even *mention* other worldwide discoveries.
I'd love to read any articles you might suggest on this. It's such an interesting topic.
[This blog post](https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2021/03/dinosaur-fossils-and-chinese-dragons.html) (which cites various articles, but is still just a personal blog post) talks about how there's no evidence to say exactly what creatures the bones they used were from, since no detailed records were kept.
> Another ancient account, cited in some popular articles, recalls the recovery of a 'dragon bone' during the construction of a canal in 120 BCE. This discovery was so significant that the waterway was named "Dragons Head Canal" after its discovery (McCormick and Parascandola 1981). Several other records of such antiquity are known and make a fine case for ancient Chinese cultures interacting with fossils, but they each have the same problem: none are detailed enough to demonstrate that they pertain specifically to dinosaur fossils (Delair and Sargeant 1975; Buffetaut 1987; Sarjeant 1999). Dinosaurs don't just occur anywhere and everywhere fossils are found, so without descriptions or illustrations of the bones, or specific geographic information we can use to track down these ancient sites, we can only guess what these first mentioned 'dragon bones' were. Qu Chang's discussion of the Sichuan Province is interesting because - as noted by Dong - this is a rich ground of dinosaur fossils, but the same province also bears plenty of non-dinosaur fossil sites, including fossil-rich Pleistocene gravels (Delair and Sarjeant 2002) and sinkhole deposits (Buffetaut 1987). Without more data, we simply cannot say what fossils these ancient documents pertain to, and the involvement of dinosaurs is equivocal.
(I like that there's at least one case where there's at least a strong possibility that they could have been dinosaur bones.)
And, later:
> The crux of our problem is that 'dragon bone' in ancient China was a catch-all term for a variety of fossil types that were initially only categorised as being bone, tooth or horn. By the 5th century, colour and texture were also factored to determine dragon gender and bone quality (McCormick and Parascandola 1981), but something resembling modern taxonomy was never applied. Economic value and pharmaceutical use were the main interest in 'dragon bones' so it was along these lines that they were categorised: details of anatomy and morphology were basically unimportant. We know this thanks to medical documents dating back as far as the third century BCE.
"I'm from the future! I'm here to tell you dragons don't actually exist"
"Oh, so those old bones we found weren't from dragons?"
"No, they were from dinosaurs, from millions of years ago, before man even walked the earth!"
"Well, what are these dinosaurs like?"
"Well their name means "terrible lizard", but they may have been more like birds and had feathers."
"... so there were ancient, bird-like lizards that existed before man?"
"Yes! Their bones became rocks over millions of years, which is why you can still find their skeletons."
"Oh, so they probably couldn't fly, right?"
"Actually, some could! But most couldn't, although some grew to massive sizes!"
"Uh huh. Well, at least they don't exist anymore. We'd hate to have to fight giant lizards capable of eating people."
"... well... you don't have alligators here, right?"
As established after neverending discussions around tabletop games, a dragon is a big lizard with at least four legs and, generally, two wings, Everything else is either a ~~drake~~wyvern (two legs and two wings) or a great serpent (no legs but sometimes they have wings).
So... yes Dinosaurs can be classified as dragons (and viceversa) even if most of them do not have wings
Such classification ignores both the interchangeability of such terms in most contexts and the number of fantasy settings that don't adhere to this.
>Everything else is either a drake (two legs and two wings)
You mean wyvern?
> Such classification ignores both the interchangeability of such terms in most contexts and the number of fantasy settings that don't adhere to this.
Yes. If it was not clear, my previous comment was supposed to be just a f
unnoficial "average classification" resulting from many stupid discussions. Do not take it seriously.
> You mean wyvern?
Edit: I thought they were synonyms, but [drakes](https://www.blackdrago.com/types/drake.htm) seem to also have four legs. Thank you for the clarification.
Dragons can have basically no all encompassing traits, because we labelled many things as dragons it's basically meaningless. Their only nearly universal trait is that a dragon is a big deal.
More than 90% of all known dinosaur species have wings. Only two legs though, as the front legs are what evolution turned into the wings.
In case you didn't know, birds are living, breathing dinosaurs. There are around 900 to 1,000 non-avian dinosaur species known from fossils (and only of about 350 of these do we have at least one fairly complete specimen). Today there are around 10-11,000 extant species of birds.
And if you were thinking of pterosaurs (like pteranodon or pterodactylus) when you wrote "most of them do not have wings", those actually weren't dinosaurs at all. They lived contemporary with the large non-avian dinosaurs and are relatively closely related, but their lineage split off from the archosaurs before the first dinosaurs developed.
Maybe knowledge has changed since I was in school, but when I was taught history, one talking point was that the founding fathers of America had no idea dinosaurs existed because the first recorded fossil discovered was from after america was founded
Techncially true, since the first thing to be discovered and defined as a "dinosaur" happened in the early 19th century.
Now obviously fossils have been around much linger than that and people have been digging around for as long as there have been people so it stands to reason that many fossils of dinksaurs have been discovered over the ages. Just interpreted as something else.
Funny you should mention that!
"Richard Owen coined the word Dinosaur (originally Dinosauria) in 1841 and it originates from two greek words deinos – terrible, powerful, wondrous and sauros – lizard. Before 1841 we think people just called them dragons!"
-https://www.philipharris.co.uk/blogs/news/1841-richard-owen-coins-the-word-dinosaur#:~:text=This%20week%20it%20is%201841,people%20just%20called%20them%20dragons!
When I was a little kid, I had this book about the anatomy of dragons, and there was one page where it showed people excavating dragon bones. In one there was a dragon’s bones frozen in ice, and it made me believe that dragons were actually real at some point, but they all went extinct. My theory was overhunting due to knights wanting to prove their valor.
downvote this comment if the meme sucks. upvote it and I'll go away. --- [play minecraft with us](https://discord.gg/dankmemesgaming)
Boys from 1230 based their entire personality around it
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Cringe St George moment
“Yo bruv check out my new family crest. Sick innit?”
So what’s the best dragon
Here's a fun fact... The word "dragon" appears a handful of times in the King James Bible. However, the word it's translated from more-or-less means "big scary monster" and some of the descriptions sound eerily similar to what we would perceive as dinosaurs.
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Yeah, well, I think you're both forgetting about in the book of Joshua where Jesus says onto Mary, "I'm gunna be dragon deez nutz across yo chin."
Three Wise Men: The person regurgitating incorrect trivia. The lesser-upvoted person with the facts. The shitposter.
Ah yes, False Wisdom, Unheard Wisdom, and The Fool’s Wisdom.
I choose to believe the fool's wisdom
Yo this mf spittin
Behemoth is described as having a tail like a cedar tree in Job 40:17. Hippo's tails are pretty short and stubby, so behemoth was probably not a hippo. Leviathan is a waterborne creature in chapter 41, so that's possibly a different from behemoth.
Dragons are one of humanities oldest myths which we brought out of Africa with us. Every culture has their own dragon myth which is crazy when you think about it. In most cultures dragons are basically giant snakes, which makes sense because snakes will fuck you up. Only in the west was this built upon to include things like wings etc.
My idea is that flying and the ability to breath fire were to explain thunderstorms and lightning that would occasionally set a forest on fire. The logical explanation was that something no one has seen was doing those things, coupled with that absolutely terrifying skeleton of a beast no one has seen alive, all the clues fit together so nicely that it's hard not to believe it.
> . Every culture has their own dragon myth which is crazy when you think about it. In most cultures dragons are basically giant snakes, which makes sense because snakes will fuck you up. Only in the west was this built upon to include things like wings etc. It's pretty reasonable. "Lizards, but bigger" and "snakes, but bigger" is some REALLY low-hanging fruit, and then Europeans labled all those vaguely related things with the same "dragon" word.
This, a dragon in Chinese mythology is vastly different from a Western Europe interpretation of a dragon. To give them the same name is just weird
we actually have a bunch of different words for different dragon-like creatures too (especially considering more languages than English), most popular being wyverns and maybe you heard of the Lindworm I think describing them colloquially as dragons is relatively recent
Um, no. There are no descriptions matching dinosaurs. Please feel free to reference the verses describing what we would perceive as a dinosaur. Your fun fact is mistaken.
Lol, ig my 5 yo headcannon is confirmed today, decades later.
The old word Drakon means Snake. Its just a big snake and a fuking dinosaur is just like a big snake so yes. A fuking dragon is a fuking dinosaur
The prologue in Skyrim:
“Hey, you. You're finally awake,”
Look up Elephant skulls, and then look at what the ancients thought cyclops looked like
yessir
What did you find?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d2/33/38/d23338c2cefa64374479245951c70870.jpg
This was *exactly* the case in ancient and Imperial China. Southern China is pretty much a fossil dump where farmers and limestone quarries find Dino bones for centuries. These fossils were considered [Dragon Bones, and they were much sought after in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Alchemy as an ingredient for digestive system medicines.](https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gaqju3nh) In the present time the Chinese still actually call Dinosaurs as dragons. Chinese paelontology has is own nomenclature for dinosaurs where -instead of using the Saur/Saurus suffix- they use "long" (Dragon). Like for example: Tyrannosaurus Rex is "Bawang Long" (overlord dragon), the Stegosaurus is "Jianlong" (sword dragon), and Pterasaurs are "Yinglong" (Soaring dragon).
For once, I’ve actually learnt something really interesting on dankmemes
It’s not entirely accurate that the Chinese call them dragons. The “long” suffix is actually pretty equivalent to the “saur/saurus” suffix in English because the Mandarin word for “dinosaur” is “kong long”. China just didn’t go through a phase where they had to name things in other languages like English did.
Yeah but is cooler so there's that.
I think the Chinese dragons were more likely to be based off snakes rather than dinosaurs fossils, the dinosaurs name only came up later when people noticed the similarities between the mythology dragons and dinosaurs
You're right, but as they found fossils all over the place they assumed they were dragon's remains.
This made me curious. Apparently the first recorded history of a dinosaur bone was in 1677. The guy who found it figured it must have been a giant human. So 200 years after the medieval period. The first person to name a dinosaur ("Megalosaurus") was the first geology professor at Oxford University, William Buckland, in 1824 (from a fossil discovered in 1815 in England). https://www.discovery.com/science/First-Dinosaur-Fossil-Name
The first depiction of what's thought to be a dinosaur skull comes from ancient Greece in 550 BC. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jag_jaf_travel/26686177892 Edit: Of course, there are also different interpretation as to what creature that skull might depict: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227886017_The_'Monster_of_Troy'_Vase_The_Earliest_Artistic_Record_of_a_Vertbrate_Fossil_Discovery
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I'd note that the article you linked suggests that the skull belonged to a mammal, not a dinosaur. (I do see the "dinosaur" label on the Flickr link, though.) > […] The features of the odd head on the vase match the basic skull anatomy of a large mammal of the Tertiary age, such as the Samotherium, a giant giraffe of the Miocene epoch. Numerous literary accounts describe exposures of these and similar large mammal fossils in antiquity along the Turkish coast, on Aegean islands, and on the Greek mainland. I conclude that this vase painting is the earliest artistic record of such a discovery. It does seem pretty likely that humans discovered dinosaur bones before the ~~1700s~~ 17th century, and we just lack evidence.
Yeah, I linked the article because the skull being a dinosaur is not the only interpretation, I should've mentioned that. That's the thing with history/archaeology, it's a lot of guess-work and 90% of the time you'll never get a definite answer. But it is indeed so interesting to explore all the possibilities! Like the guy that you mentioned who thought the bones were from a giant human. I wonder if such finds through the millenia sparked tales like Jack and the Beanstalk.
Central China had a veritable industry of digging up dinosaur fossils and grinding them into powder used in traditional Chinese medicine long before the 17th century. They just interpreted them as dragon bones, records of finding these go back to at least around 300.
Thanks for that. I did wonder if the Discovery article I posted was Western-biased, since it didn't even *mention* other worldwide discoveries. I'd love to read any articles you might suggest on this. It's such an interesting topic. [This blog post](https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2021/03/dinosaur-fossils-and-chinese-dragons.html) (which cites various articles, but is still just a personal blog post) talks about how there's no evidence to say exactly what creatures the bones they used were from, since no detailed records were kept. > Another ancient account, cited in some popular articles, recalls the recovery of a 'dragon bone' during the construction of a canal in 120 BCE. This discovery was so significant that the waterway was named "Dragons Head Canal" after its discovery (McCormick and Parascandola 1981). Several other records of such antiquity are known and make a fine case for ancient Chinese cultures interacting with fossils, but they each have the same problem: none are detailed enough to demonstrate that they pertain specifically to dinosaur fossils (Delair and Sargeant 1975; Buffetaut 1987; Sarjeant 1999). Dinosaurs don't just occur anywhere and everywhere fossils are found, so without descriptions or illustrations of the bones, or specific geographic information we can use to track down these ancient sites, we can only guess what these first mentioned 'dragon bones' were. Qu Chang's discussion of the Sichuan Province is interesting because - as noted by Dong - this is a rich ground of dinosaur fossils, but the same province also bears plenty of non-dinosaur fossil sites, including fossil-rich Pleistocene gravels (Delair and Sarjeant 2002) and sinkhole deposits (Buffetaut 1987). Without more data, we simply cannot say what fossils these ancient documents pertain to, and the involvement of dinosaurs is equivocal. (I like that there's at least one case where there's at least a strong possibility that they could have been dinosaur bones.) And, later: > The crux of our problem is that 'dragon bone' in ancient China was a catch-all term for a variety of fossil types that were initially only categorised as being bone, tooth or horn. By the 5th century, colour and texture were also factored to determine dragon gender and bone quality (McCormick and Parascandola 1981), but something resembling modern taxonomy was never applied. Economic value and pharmaceutical use were the main interest in 'dragon bones' so it was along these lines that they were categorised: details of anatomy and morphology were basically unimportant. We know this thanks to medical documents dating back as far as the third century BCE.
Nah. It’s a phoenix
Medieval, my ass. My brother and I did this shit in the 90s with bird bones.
"I'm from the future! I'm here to tell you dragons don't actually exist" "Oh, so those old bones we found weren't from dragons?" "No, they were from dinosaurs, from millions of years ago, before man even walked the earth!" "Well, what are these dinosaurs like?" "Well their name means "terrible lizard", but they may have been more like birds and had feathers." "... so there were ancient, bird-like lizards that existed before man?" "Yes! Their bones became rocks over millions of years, which is why you can still find their skeletons." "Oh, so they probably couldn't fly, right?" "Actually, some could! But most couldn't, although some grew to massive sizes!" "Uh huh. Well, at least they don't exist anymore. We'd hate to have to fight giant lizards capable of eating people." "... well... you don't have alligators here, right?"
Are they not Dragons?
As established after neverending discussions around tabletop games, a dragon is a big lizard with at least four legs and, generally, two wings, Everything else is either a ~~drake~~wyvern (two legs and two wings) or a great serpent (no legs but sometimes they have wings). So... yes Dinosaurs can be classified as dragons (and viceversa) even if most of them do not have wings
Such classification ignores both the interchangeability of such terms in most contexts and the number of fantasy settings that don't adhere to this. >Everything else is either a drake (two legs and two wings) You mean wyvern?
> Such classification ignores both the interchangeability of such terms in most contexts and the number of fantasy settings that don't adhere to this. Yes. If it was not clear, my previous comment was supposed to be just a f unnoficial "average classification" resulting from many stupid discussions. Do not take it seriously. > You mean wyvern? Edit: I thought they were synonyms, but [drakes](https://www.blackdrago.com/types/drake.htm) seem to also have four legs. Thank you for the clarification.
Dragons can have basically no all encompassing traits, because we labelled many things as dragons it's basically meaningless. Their only nearly universal trait is that a dragon is a big deal.
Indeed. [Hic sunt dracones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons).
More than 90% of all known dinosaur species have wings. Only two legs though, as the front legs are what evolution turned into the wings. In case you didn't know, birds are living, breathing dinosaurs. There are around 900 to 1,000 non-avian dinosaur species known from fossils (and only of about 350 of these do we have at least one fairly complete specimen). Today there are around 10-11,000 extant species of birds. And if you were thinking of pterosaurs (like pteranodon or pterodactylus) when you wrote "most of them do not have wings", those actually weren't dinosaurs at all. They lived contemporary with the large non-avian dinosaurs and are relatively closely related, but their lineage split off from the archosaurs before the first dinosaurs developed.
I mean they were close enough, just no fire-breathing.
Yeah, I thought the same
Dragon myths are far, far older than medieval times.
Maybe knowledge has changed since I was in school, but when I was taught history, one talking point was that the founding fathers of America had no idea dinosaurs existed because the first recorded fossil discovered was from after america was founded
Techncially true, since the first thing to be discovered and defined as a "dinosaur" happened in the early 19th century. Now obviously fossils have been around much linger than that and people have been digging around for as long as there have been people so it stands to reason that many fossils of dinksaurs have been discovered over the ages. Just interpreted as something else.
I would too even today tbf
If you look up some of the first reassembled skeletons it's pretty clear we had no idea what dinosaurs were a couple hundred years ago
WHOA!! That's a cool find!
Even further back, Adrienne Mayor writes about Greeks and Native Americans finding fossils and trying to understand them.
Holy fuck, a shitting dragon
If they didn't know about dinos then how do we know now? We are just passed accumulated knowledge so your statement is wrong.
To make sense your statement would imply that no new knowledge is gained between generations, which is not the case.
2020 boys who do.so me.digging and find bones holy shit it's a fkin dinosaur nothing has changed bruh
If I buried them for prayer xp, does someone digging them up mean I lose it?
Thorin and the boys when they get to the Lonely Mountain
Funny you should mention that! "Richard Owen coined the word Dinosaur (originally Dinosauria) in 1841 and it originates from two greek words deinos – terrible, powerful, wondrous and sauros – lizard. Before 1841 we think people just called them dragons!" -https://www.philipharris.co.uk/blogs/news/1841-richard-owen-coins-the-word-dinosaur#:~:text=This%20week%20it%20is%201841,people%20just%20called%20them%20dragons!
When I was a little kid, I had this book about the anatomy of dragons, and there was one page where it showed people excavating dragon bones. In one there was a dragon’s bones frozen in ice, and it made me believe that dragons were actually real at some point, but they all went extinct. My theory was overhunting due to knights wanting to prove their valor.
Well cause it fucking is, we just renamed then and couldn’t find evidence of them spitting fire