How Dragons Came To Be

Dragon Flying by a Castle

Dragons are a mythological animal.  This is a possibility of where the idea of dragons came from.  Dragons are found in nearly every culture.  I am half Welsh and I have Welsh Dragon cuff links given to me by my mother's boyfriend, who was from Wales.  There are Chinese dragons too that I am very familiar with.  There are European dragons, Japanese dragons, Korean and other East Asian dragons.  The Greeks believed in dragons as well.  The Temple of Athena had on the alter what was probably a Plesiosaur skull.

That is my point.  Perhaps many of the legends of dragons came to be because of fossils that were found of ancient animals.  The ancients put two and two together and and came up with some of their fiercest monsters.  .   .  in their minds.  This happened with woolly mammoth bones.  The Greeks found a skeleton and thought that the nasal cavity was an eye hole, so they figured that they had found a cyclops.  

So, if you take a Theropod (carnivorous dinosaur) skeleton ...and you have also found a Pterosaur or Pterodactyl skeleton... and you put the two together ..and some imagination...and you might come up with a flying, fire breathing dragon. 

Utahraptor was found in Utah around the same time they were filming the movie Jurassic Park.  Steven Speilberg's "Velociraptors" were actually way to big to be the 6 foot (2 meters) long Velociraptor.  .  .  however, Utahraptor was about the correct size for the "Velociraptor" of Jurassic Park.  Also, I drew it this time with only proto-feathers, but all the raptor dinosaurs probably had fully developed feathers covering most of their bodies.  Raptors did not have flight feathers, but other dinosaurs like Microraptor DID have flight feathers.  

Utahraptor

Microraptor

Microraptor was a true flying dinosaur.  Paleontologists think that dinosaurs like Microraptor evolved into birds.  Microraptor was only about 3.3 feet (1 meter) long.  It lived in a forest environment.  Chemists have analyzed the fossilized feathers and discovered that Microraptor was black...sort of iridescent... like a raven.  That means it was a shiny black that somewhat bends the light and gave it a black with hints of rainbow colors.  (Brand new volcanic rocks are this cool iridescent black color for the first few weeks after they cool..wind, before the wind, rain and sun turn them brown.)  Microraptor has been on a blog post before.  

Pteranodon Fishing

The flying reptiles are known as Pterosaurs.  Some people also call the Pterodactyls.  This one from the Cretaceous Period is known as Pteranodon.  The Pterosaurs from the Jurassic still had tails but the Pterosaurs from the Cretaceous had lost their tails.  Some Pterosaurs were as big as a small plane.  Pterosaurs ate fish.  We think they lived near the ocean and skimmed the surface with their long pointed jaws to grab fish.  Pterosaurs were NOT flying dinosaurs.  They were flying reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs.  Pterosaurs did not have feathers.  When the larger dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, the Pterosaurs did too.  Pterosaurs did NOT evolve into birds.