![]() ![]() If the very earliest humans had an oral tradition, they may well have passed down accounts of creatures that went extinct 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. This is the shakiest, but the most romantic, of all dragon theories. Dragons were loosely based on recently extinct mammals and reptiles.As with the above theory, this would explain why so many dragons are chimeras that seem to have been assembled from the body parts of various animals. Just like modern paleontologists, these accidental fossil-hunters may have been inspired to visually reconstruct "dragons" by piecing together bleached skulls and backbones. Ancient civilizations could easily have stumbled across the bones of long-extinct dinosaurs or the mammalian megafauna of the Cenozoic Era. Dragons were inspired by the discovery of giant fossils. ![]() ![]() Since the details of dragon anatomy vary from culture to culture, it may be that these monsters were assembled piecemeal from familiar, fearsome predators: for example, the head of a crocodile, the scales of a snake, the pelt of a tiger, and the wings of an eagle. Until only a few hundred years ago, human life was nasty, brutish, and short, and many adults and children met their end at the teeth (and claws) of vicious wildlife. Dragons were mixed-and-matched from the most frightening predators of the day. ![]()
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