Where Dragon Legends Came From

Large bones from extinct animals lie less deeply than you might think. A river erodes a bank, a landslide exposes a slope - and suddenly a person is facing a skull the size of a wagon. There is no way to explain it: dinosaurs have not yet been discovered, but the animal clearly existed.

Then ordinary logic takes over. The bones are huge, so the animal must have been huge. The shape is unfamiliar, so the animal must have been unfamiliar too. That's how the monster ends up with its size, a ridge along its back, and a snout unlike any other.

It is almost never possible to connect a specific discovery to a specific legend: these are plausible guesses, not proven chains of evidence. But the mechanism itself is clear - an unexplained bone demands an explanation, and an explanation appears.

Another kind of legend grew out of retelling. A traveler saw a monitor lizard and described it at home as a lizard the size of a person. The listener added wings, because otherwise it was unclear how it had climbed onto a cliff. By the third retelling, the animal had become a dragon, and no one had even lied along the way.

A legend is assembled from whatever the storyteller has at hand. Where life depended on river floods, the dragon came to resemble a snake and became associated with water and rain. Where people feared predators and fires, it acquired legs, wings, and fire.