Jones (anthropology, Univ. of Central Florida) contends that the dragon...

If he was right about this, we would see dragons being a lot more bird-like and a lot more cat-like for much longer.

What about crocodiles?
Everyone always forgets about those despite being common as hell, armored, fast, reptilian horrors if you don't have a rifle, ect.

Clever girl.

If they're beasts of nightmare then why do people want to have sex with them?

>not wanting to fuck your nightmares

I call upon Melinoe, saffron-cloaked nymph of the earth,
whom revered Persephone bore by the mouth of the Kokytos river
upon the sacred bed of Kronian Zeus.
In the guise of Plouton Zeus and tricked Persephone and through wiley plots bedded her;
a two-bodied specter sprang forth from Persephone's fury.
This specter drives mortals to madness with her airy apparitions
as she appears in weird shapes and strange forms,
now plain to the eye, now shadowy, now shining in the darkness—
all this in unnerving attacks in the gloom of night.
O goddess, O queen of those below, I beseech you
to banish the soul's frenzy to the ends of the earth,
and show to the initiates a kindly and holy face.

Ride the nightmare my friend--lest it rides you.

Imagine being a small mammal, and having to deal with this. You'd probably think it's a dragon.

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Nope.

I thought the dragons were how people tried to explain dinosaur bones?

Still, I like idea of taking 3 scary animals, smashing them together, and then doing some fine tuning so that it becomes harder to make out the component parts.

>rage, strength, and fine motor skills of a chimp
>mouth, backridge, and blood tracking of a shark
>jerking body movement and voice mimicry of a parrot

Bam. I know what I'm running tonight.

The issue is that not every culture considers dragons to be a negative creature. Plenty of cultures worship their equivalent, such as most Asian cultures and their dragon, and most Native Americans with their Horned Serpent.

WE WUZ TARGETZ N SHIET

I always knew UCF was a drive-through college, but I didn't think it'd be this bad.

This isn't an actual myth. This is an Orphian hymn. They were essentially atheistic, they though the stories of the gods were symbolic for natural processes and events, as well as prophesies and secret knowledge, and thus invented a bunch of myths to account for ideas and concepts. Here, Zeus and Persephone are not beings, but metaphysical concepts, and Melinoe herself represents the concept of nightmares via mingling of those metaphysical concepts. None of them they considered to be actual beings.

That looks like it'd block the esophagus.

The real reason is is that dragons are fucking cool.
Kids love dinosaurs: Anything with dinosaurs sells like it's made of sugar. Dinosaurs were big and powerful and scary and fast and dangerous. Hence, kids and adults love them.
So you're trying to write a story- what animals are cool? Snakes. Snakes scare the shit out of you, because they're poisonous and slippery and fast. Lions are also super powerful hunters, to the point where if you kill a lion you're automatically a badass.
You make a snake that's got the build and legs of a lion. That's pretty fucking cool. But you know what would be cooler? Giving it wings, so it can fly, even though you can't actually fly at that size. But that's still not cool enough. So make it breathe fire, because that's sick as hell.
Now, in the middle ages, you hear about this legend about a guy that killed a flying snake with the body and jaws of a lion that can breathe fire. Name a creature that's cooler and more terrifying than that. You can't.
So that's why dragons show up everywhere. Nobody's thought up a cooler monster that doesn't look human.

>incredible similarities in the appearance and behavior of dragons in the lore and legend surrounding them
But Eastern dragons are nothing like Western ones aside from being vaguely reptilian.

Serpent fear is one of the oldest evolved fears humankind has. We even share an instinct with all other primates to jump back when a snake strikes.

Darwin used to go to the reptile house of his local zoo and put his face right up against the glass of the snakes and try to force himself not to jump back when it struck at him, but he couldn't no matter how hard he tried. That's how deep the fear of serpents are ingrained in us.

What in the fuck am I looking at?

Either shoebills have very, very stretchy tissue in their throats and across the bottom of their jaws, or that bird is dead.

youtu.be/lu3Iqze5mgo

It's probably fine.

yep

lel, no

Right, but you can still want to fuck it.

>six limbed vertebrates

What the fuck are they teaching.

I feel this poorly explains the very common traits he's pointing to. Take the wings for example - they're not bird wings, they share many more traits with the wings of bats. If this hypothesis were true, you'd expect to see them look more like bird wings in the earliest depictions.

Dr. Jones got the Hellboy artist to back this mess up?

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To be fair, some people also want to be eaten by them.

>sphinx without the human
Despite just being a big lion with fluffy wings, it looks better than normal sphinxes.
If it went for the Grecian (I think?) sphinx's serpent tail, we'd have all 3 of the animals OP mentioned.

This is a whole hog of hot opinions based on personal interpretations. Its a huge assumption based on literally, meaning literally in the literal sense, small scraps and fragments cobbled together.

There is nothing to suggest anything associated with the Orphic (not 'Orphian') mysteries and cults were in any way atheistic or allegorical outside a 'hunch' from some translators, and a lot to suggest that yes, they did believe in Gods, the afterlife, ritual sacrifice and every other superstition found in the ancient world.

>Someone realizes archaeology is largely based on guesswork.
>Comes by on Veeky Forums and sees one of the commonly accepted views on the subject posted. Specifically, the one he doesn't agree with.
>Thinks that this is the perfect place and time to try and seriously debate the subject like he's an expert and his opinion has any value in seriously determining the truth.

Hello yes welcome to Veeky Forums.

no dinosaur bone was discovered before the 18th century, dumbasses.
beyond that, there was no possible way for people back then to recognize dinosaur bones as reptilian.
Christ, how can people be this retarded?

>no dinosaur bone was discovered before the 18th century
Citation heavily needed.

I'd place my bet on Dino bones.

Also the chimeric dragons only came about due to christian art depicting a bunch of chimeric creatures they adapted from Greek and Jewish myths.

Prior to that the image of Dragons across Europe was that of serpents or serpentine lizards with 4 legs.

This here.
And what ascpect in a dragon is the big cat?
What about spiders, scorpions, wolves, bears?

Please see and for depictions of Sumerian Dragons, which predate Christianity by about 2000 years.

that user was wrong. it was the 17th century
scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/when-was-first-dinosaur-discovered/
why would every culture on Earth, even cultures that aren't involved much in digging underground, all discover dinosaur bones and all erroneously decide they were scaly things that eat people?

Yeah, no. Large-scale excavation and scientific investigation of dinosaur bones may not have begun until then, but there's records of dinosaur bones being discovered throughout all of recorded human history. They most certainly at least influenced early myths and legends.

>dragons are formed from a mix of threatening predators
>all dragons were threatening monsters

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>why would every culture on Earth, even cultures that aren't involved much in digging underground, all discover dinosaur bones and all erroneously decide they were scaly things that eat people?
They didn't. Educate yourself in oriental myths.

... aren't chinese dragons benevolent?

>Comes by on Veeky Forums and sees one of the commonly accepted views on the subject posted
Its actually not that commonly accepted. It's a very thinly drawn conclusion based on a text that's only a commentary on another text that we don't have a full copy of. A full text of both commentary and the original text its referencing.

So are snakes. Tigers could be benevolent if you were smart.

youtube.com/watch?v=CHJnxggzaeg

What kind of bird will hunt a human? Aren't we, like, a bit too big?

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Don't make fun of /x/, he'll put a hex on us.

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Damn harpies.

I mean, it's not like it needs to have six limbs for it to be a dragon.
The real issue here is that dragon is an incredibly vague term, if any mythology has any sort of monster with distant similarities people will immediately translate it to dragon and spread te myth that the creatures appear in mythology all over the world.

I heard one theory that stories of cyclopes might have been spurred by finding mammoth or even just elephant skulls, as the big hole in the center where the trunk goes would seem like a giant eyesocket to folks who don't know elephants well.

I actually heard that with triceratops, with the central horn being the eye.

Although, that's kinda stupid, thinking about it, but I didn't question it at the time.

In New Zeland there existed a bird of prey that hunted ostrich size birds, for creature that size early humans (that were shorter) would be a nice treat.

The only surviving terrestrial megafauna are things like elephants and rhinos. Because we killed and ate everything else

They didn't. It wasn't erroneous, you've just never gotten to see one.

This. Dragons being universal is just euro-centric bullshit. We wouldn't even call chinese dragons and western dragons by the same name if we lived in a sino-centric world.

It's clearly just a weird manticore.

You know that most humans fit the technical definition of megafauna, right?

All you have to do is be an animal and weigh over 100 lbs.

Manticores have bat-wings and scorpion tails. It's missing 2 things to be a manticore, but only one to be a sphinx.

And even then thats a mis-interpretation of the scales, as eastern dragons are commonly connected to fish.

He's using the other definition, which is 1000 kg. So we still have to include your mom.

>It doesn't need to be a dragon, it just has to fit into my own vague definition that happens to prove me right to strangers on the internet!~

Snakes weren't seen as universally evil in the west before christianity.

Who didn't think snakes were evil? I mean they're poisonous and scary, it's easy to see why people would dislike them.

The human head is essential for the sphinx and what defines it. The bird wings are optional so you could as well say that a lion only misses one thing to be a sphinx too.

Also you don't see the end of his tail, that could perfectly end in a scorpion sting.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_in_mythology

lolwut are you even saying?

people want to have sex with everything, user

Australian abbos ended up eating these things charrred methinks.

Yeah, there's evidence that early inhabitants of Australia burned down wide areas of forest to create farmland, which also killed megalania and denied those that survived the woods they used to ambush prey.

>being afraid of dragons
For what purpose? Dragons are cute.
>but theyre big and they could kill you-
They stopped giving me xp YEARS ago.

>Veeky Forums poster still thinks he's an expert.

>but they're big and they could kill you
Alternatively, they could fuck you. And perhaps you could convince one to only "eat" you ;)

I wanna touch that dragon's tail

>Got his opinion called out by someone who has slightly more knowledge
>N-no, YOU'RE pretending to be the know-it-all!

>BBW: not even once

Not true. A lot of the predatory megafauna went extinct because we killed and ate their food.

What's scary about a snake?

For some reason I'm recalling reading an article that talked about spider nightmares being more prevalent than anything else, cross culturally

I know, right? They're adorable!
youtube.com/watch?v=aCFMmOR5Z4A

If you get bitten by some of them you die in agony.

Yeah but not most of them.

Better safe than sorry.

Don't they move in a certain way that subconsciously agitates humans too? Like spiders?

Might as well never leave your house at that rate.