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Originally Posted by koosie
I like friendly dragons preferably with glasses. Koosalagoopagoop obviously is fantastic but he's a bit like Chorlton from 70s animation Chorlton and The Wheelies. Not many of you are likely to remember across Snodgrass from Puddle Lane who was the best friend of the wizard played by Neil Innes, the unpleasant minstrel from Monty Python & The Holy Grail.
Remember Scorch? He was the best ventriloquist dummy ever. He really blew fire.
Funny how there are dragons are in cultures round the round. Memories of dinosaurs perhaps, breathing misty/smokey breath on chilly mornings?
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Yeah, it is really fascinating that in virtually every human culture, even that of the Inuit in the Canadian and Alaskan coasts, there is some sort of dragon concept/myth(?), or some belief in intelligent, reptile-like beings. The problem with the dinosaur theory, though, is that the dinosaurs, at least in the forms that we think of as dinosaurs(as opposed to BIRDS), supposedly became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, while the first hominids did not appear until a bit over 3 million years ago, and true humans, ie
Homo sapiens, did not appear until around 30 thousand years ago, long, long after the dinosaurs died out. There is simply no way that any human, or even any true primate, had ever actually seen a dinosaur. While in some cultures, especially those of the Mongolians and Chinese, belief in dragons may have been influenced by finding dinosaur bones, which are very common in that part of the world, that is not the case in others. The Houmas Indians of southern Louisiana, for example, had a belief in a tribe of intelligent, upright-walking, scaly-skinned lizard or dragon-like beings that they called the "LeTeche". At the time of the last dinosaurs, that entire regions was still under the Gulf of Mexico, so there are no dino fossils even found there at all. Belief in dragons also appears in cultures on islands that formed volcanically, long after the last dinosaurs were gone, so there are no fossils there, either, and these same people clearly know the differences between dragons as most people know them, and large lizards and crocodiles which have evolved on those islands. It DOES make you wonder, though-since the universally widespread belief in dragons or other intelligent reptilians could not have stemmed from encounters with dinosaurs, or even their fossilized remains in most cases, just where DID these beliefs come from?
pitbulllady