January 23, 2012
Happy Chinese New Year! 2012 is the Year of the Dragon.
Were there dragons in the old days? We’ve never found any bones of dragons, or dragon eggs, or anything else that leads scientists to believe that dragons once existed. So where did the idea for dragons come about? Probably from discoveries of skeletons of huge animals such as whales, and from fossils (bones turned into stone) of dinosaurs and mammoths. These may have been mistakenly thought to be the bones of dragons, unicorns and other mythological beasts. In China, the shapes of dragons look like huge snakes; in other cultures, dragon shapes vary and they look more like other kinds of reptiles such as crocodiles. Many fictional fantasy worlds include dragons as characters.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
