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Komodo dragons have long, forked tongues that they use to help smell and taste.Komodo dragons have long, forked tongues that they use to help smell and taste. (Image credit: Sergey Uryadnikov / Shutterstock)So, are they real?Medieval theology aside, few people today believe in the literal existence of dragons in the way they may believe in the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, for example. The dragon (or at least the dragon version most familiar to Westerners) is simply too big and too fantastic to take seriously or literally. In the modern age of satellite imagery and smart phone photos and videos, it’s simply implausible that any giant, winged fire-breathers inhabit Earth’s lands or skies unseen.However, only a few centuries ago rumors of dragons seemed to have been confirmed by eyewitness accounts from sailors returning from Indonesia who reported encountering dragons — Komodo dragons, a type of monitor lizard — which can be aggressive, deadly, and reach 10 feet in length. (In a possible parallel to dragons, it was previously believed that the bite of a Komodo dragon was especially deadly because of toxic bacteria in its mouth, though that myth was debunked in 2013 by a team of researchers from the University of Queensland who discovered that the Komodo dragon’s mouths are no dirtier than those of other carnivores.) Western scientists only verified the existence of the Komodo dragon around 1910, but rumors and stories of these fearsome beasts circulated long before that.
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Dragons of Legend“The dragons of legend are strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are much like the great reptiles which inhabited the earth long before man is supposed to have appeared on earth. Dragons were generally evil and destructive. Every country had them in its mythology.” (Knox, Wilson, “Dragon,” The World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 5, 1973, p. 265.) The article on dragons in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1949 edition) noted that dinosaurs were “astonishingly dragonlike,” even though its author assumed that those ancients who believed in dragons did so “without the slightest knowledge” of dinosaurs. The truth is that the fathers of modern paleontology used the terms “dinosaur” and “dragon” interchangeably for quite some time.In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language Noah Webster sought out the derivation of the word dragon among the ancient Medieval roots. He concluded, “Hence I infer that the word originally signified a shooting meteor in the atmosphere, a fiery meteor, and hence a fiery or flying serpent, from a root which signified to shoot or draw out.” His first definition of the word dragon was “A kind of winged serpent, much celebrated in the romance of the middle ages.” (Webster, Daniel, An American Dictionary of the English Language, S. Converse, New York, 1828, p. 67.)ivanlagoon dragonStories of dragons have been handed down for generations in many civilizations. No doubt many of these stories have been exaggerated through the years. But that does not mean they had no original basis in fact. Even some living lizards look like dragons and it is easy to see how a larger variety of such an animal could frighten a community. Have you ever seen an old dinosaur film where they used an iguana in a miniature town set to create the illusion of a great dragon?
