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Could Real Dragons Ever Evolve?
The possibilities are tantalizing when we consider the power of evolution.
Dragons are the single most ubiquitous and recognizable mythological creature ever dreamed up by the human consciousness. They crop up in hundreds of cultures around the world, from China and Hawaii to New Zealand and Iceland.
These mighty, fantastical beasts hold a special place in our tales, from Smaug to Toothless, King Ghidorah to Mushu, Falkor to Fafnir, dragons entrance us with their power, graceful shapes and movement, and sometimes even wisdom.
David E. Jones, an anthropologist, believes he has come up with an explanation for this in his book An Instinct for Dragons. Jones studied vervet monkey troops of the African savannah and realized that their primary predators are raptors (birds of prey), snakes and big cats. These would have been roughly the same for humanity’s earliest ancestors such as the australopithecines. He posits that this gave rise to a deep-seated, inherited fear of such animals which has stuck with us throughout our evolution, and made its way into our nightmares and, by extension, tales of monsters.
Beowulf, St. George and the dragon, the story of the dragon’s pearl — Stories of these chimeric beasts go back thousands of years, to the very dawn of written language, and likely back to the beginnings of spoken language as well. The ancient Chinese philosopher Wang Fu even wrote of dragons as having the claws of eagles, feet of tigers and necks of snakes.
Dragons, as we imagine them, are generally reptilian in most of their features, although many possess hair, horns and even feathers. Another thing they usually have in common is large size. These factors are also seen in the “thunder lizards” that we know existed in our real world’s distant past: the dinosaurs.
We know of hundreds of dinosaur species that evolved for flight like the microraptor, as well as archosaurs such as the pterosaurs. The largest of these seems to have been Quetzalcoatlus northropi with a wingspan that reached 36 feet, roughly matching the size of many dragons of myth.
A common misconception is that birds evolved from these flying dinosaurs. However, paleontologists have known for decades now that…
