There’s an interesting article over in the newly-liberated NYT today, on the origins of the dragon myth (found via Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan), which seems to be an almost human universal.
Synopsis: we’ve always believed in dragons because of fears going back to the dawn of man, when we were still in the trees–they’re an amalgam of the primary predators for tree-dwelling primates: snakes, raptors and cats. The myth was aided in its persistence by things like dinosaur fossils, which were mistaken by the ancients as dragon bones (even including mineral encrustations in the skulls taken as signs of jewelry in the head).
Interesting, but the article doesn’t address in any way what’s always been one of the most fascinating features of the dragon (other than to note it in the standard bill of dragon particulars in the opening grafs)–the fire breathing.
No snake, raptor or cat of which I’m aware belches flame, at least not on a regular basis, given a non-incendiary diet, and like the old Warner Brothers cartoon, if it did, it would likely be a trick that could only be performed once. So what’s that all about? Is it just based on ancient memories of the extreme version of halitosis that a carnivore might display up close and personal?
And is it a universal dragon trait? I’m not a dracologist, and don’t know all the ins and outs of dragons world wide, but perhaps my readership does. Do Chinese dragons breathe fire, or is it a habit only of the European variety?
The article also points out that the ancients never really doubted that dragons once existed–for them, the main question was, “why don’t we see them any more, and what happened to them?” Given their state of knowledge, it was a perfectly reasonable question.
But here’s a point on the improbability of dragons that pre-Darwinians wouldn’t have been bothered by. Most, if not all dragons have four legs and a pair of wings. They’re kind of like lizards with wings on their backs (and in fact, many dragon hoaxes were constructed in exactly that way). That is, they really had six limbs, since wings are considered limbs.
All flying vertebrates of which I’m aware (invertebrates are a different story, of course) only have four limbs. The wings have always evolved from the front legs. This is true for both avia (all birds) and mammals (both the conventional bats, which are rodents, and the flying foxes, which seem to be primates).
Evolution is capable of amazing feats, but it has its limits, and it has to work with the material available. There really is no plausible structure available from which to build large, articulatible wings, capable of lifting the body of such a creature, that come out of the shoulder, yet still leave separate, fully-functional forelimbs. In fact (ignoring the fire-breathing deal), this modern evolutionary observation is perhaps the strongest reason to believe that dragons truly are only mythical, and have never existed.