Quote Originally Posted by Darkbrady View Post
Keep in mind that back then scientific knowledge was at a low; folklore and stories ruled the day. If a child came back sayin' that he saw a flyin' beast that matched the description of a snake/dragon, he would be taken much more seriously than he would nowadays.

The kid then goes outside and points to a komodo in the bush and a story is created. Artists envision this thing flyin' in the air and draw their own dramatisation of it.

There's nothin' to say that their stories off of were completely true; the had a baseline (dragons, snakes, reptiles..) and used their art to bring it to life. Keep in mind that not much of ancient art depicts an exact image of what things actually looked like; even pictures of humans were skewed to a degree.

Lookin' for somethin' exactly as described in ancient lore is about as futile as tryin' to prove that god exists up in the sky. But we can look at what the stories were based off of.

Snakes, reptiles and dragons bein' the obvious baseline for..well...flyin' dragons.

Unicorns were obviously enough based off of wild, vicious horses (unicorns were not always origianlly happy love-givin' ponies; they used to be considered fierce animals; in the Scottish Coat of Arms there's a Unicorn on the right thas shackled up; it's shackled because back then wild Unicorns were considered the most dangerous animal)

Those ones are pretty easy...I always find more interest in the wild, extreme ones; the Chimera, for example. How did they originally put together that beast?

[img]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lVvM5tfzc3w/Rn_GfSlFr8I/AAAAAAAAAe4/PJdPYvTpcwY/s400/chimera.jpg/[img]
As I've heard many times, legends and folklore all have a dash of truth in them.. If we could successfully analyze what the truth and false is of these legends and folklore, there would be much more knowledge about the past.