There Be Dragons! part 1&2

[guohua]

Could there have been Dragons? 

Possibly I think.
I mean, think about it, could that Comet have killed all of the Dinosaur's?

[senona]

I watched the movie 'Reign of Fire' not too long ago.
So odd that you bring up dragons. LOL

We have all been told that dragons do not exist, that they are only a myth.

I have read many books, albeit science fiction, that make the reader believe that at one time they did exist. Only to be hunted down and extinguished by Man over time.
Which that in of itself, is a reality that we all know too well in todays world.



Could they have existed at one time? Possibly.
Myths have to start from somewhere, just saying.
Of course, it could have just been created by a very imaginative hunter. Or a young lad scared of the woods. 





Question tho --

Would the dragons have been friendly? 
Or deadly? Afraid of Mankind?

[WonderCow]

@Senona Reign of Fire is one of my favourite movies of all time!

Anyone remember this 'documentary ' from a few years back?

[hounddoghowlie]

every time i hear the word dragon, i think about jethro bodine.

here are the episodes i'm talking about, check at the 3:59 mark, 8:05 mark, to the 12: mark, or just watch the whole thing it's funny as hell. but make sure you watch the end, and then the whole next one, at least the start.




woo dragon



well damn, they cut out the woo dragon on the daily motion, there are some on youtube that have it, but the quality is poor or they are loaded with ads. ads suck.

[Ninurta]

Just gonna leave this right here - a "dragon" of the mound builder aboriginals of North America:




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[Wrabbit2000]

If the truth of our history on this planet were ever known, I believe we would find a great deal of our mythology is based in fact. Facts so distant in time, there is little or nothing but the verbal stories handed down with some paintings in caves here and there .... but given enough time passed? Just what would we expect to see remaining of such history? 

The truth is not only out there, but it is more wild than we can possibly imagine.

[guohua]

If the truth of our history on this planet were ever known, I believe we would find a great deal of our mythology is based in fact. Facts so distant in time, there is little or nothing but the verbal stories handed down with some paintings in caves here and there .... but given enough time passed? Just what would we expect to see remaining of such history? 

The truth is not only out there, but it is more wild than we can possibly imagine.

I agree.

[Mystic Wanderer]

Can't remember where I saw it (I visit so many platforms), but just last week someone found a tiny dragon. It was small enough to fit in a person's palm, but still, it was a dragon. 
If I run across the picture, I'll post it here.

[WonderCow]

Can't remember where I saw it (I visit so many platforms), but just last week someone found a tiny dragon. It was small enough to fit in a person's palm, but still, it was a dragon. 
If I run across the picture, I'll post it here.

It's Pip the minidrag! Home planet Alaspin!

[Ninurta]

A page relating the Papuan "Ropen" to draagons, and dragons to pterodactyls, and so the Ropen to pterodactyls.

I found this to be interesting:

The Dakota Sioux called these thunderbirds wakinyan, and pointed out collapsed river bluffs as places where the wakinyan swooped down on Unktehi, a monstrous water reptile (Pond, 1986).

The Cherokee also have legends of a similar interaction, although the thunderbird is, as I recall, called a "Tlanuwha", and the monstrous serpent the "Uktena". Unktehi and Uktena seem to be pretty similar to me. Cherokee is a Iroquoian language, rather than Siouan, so similarities that close would point to a time long ago before those languages separated one from another, I would think.

Also, this:

“On a warm night in 1619, while contemplating the serenity of the heavens, I saw a shining dragon of great size in front of Mt. Pilatus, coming from the opposite side of the lake, a cave that is named Flue moving rapidly in an agitated way, seen flying across; it was of a large size, with a long tail, a long neck, a reptile’s head, and ferocious gaping jaws. As it flew it was like iron struck in a forge when pressed together that scatters sparks. At first I thought it was a meteor from what I saw. But after I diligently observed it alone, I understood it was indeed a dragon from the motion of the limbs of the entire body. ” (Kircher, 1664)

1619 was in "The Age of Enlightenment", so a n eye-witness report like that from that time period is pretty striking.

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[WonderCow]

A page relating the Papuan "Ropen" to draagons, and dragons to pterodactyls, and so the Ropen to pterodactyls.

I found this to be interesting:

The Dakota Sioux called these thunderbirds wakinyan, and pointed out collapsed river bluffs as places where the wakinyan swooped down on Unktehi, a monstrous water reptile (Pond, 1986).

The Cherokee also have legends of a similar interaction, although the thunderbird is, as I recall, called a "Tlanuwha", and the monstrous serpent the "Uktena". Unktehi and Uktena seem to be pretty similar to me. Cherokee is a Iroquoian language, rather than Siouan, so similarities that close would point to a time long ago before those languages separated one from another, I would think.

I wonder if they are describing teratorns? They went extinct at a time when Native Americans would have been on the scene. The giant lizard might have been some sort of alligator.

[Ninurta]

I wonder if they are describing teratorns? They went extinct at a time when Native Americans would have been on the scene. The giant lizard might have been some sort of alligator.

There are some who think teratorns are still not extinct, but instead are just incredibly rare. Those people advance teratorn relict populations as a potential explanation for thunderbird sightings that continue on to this day.

The giant lizard is really more of a giant snake, and usually described as having wings and horns, but rarely ever described as having legs. The descriptions are more like the legless Chinese dragon than they are like the legged Japanese dragon. The Cherokee "Uktena" is also described as arrow-proof, except in one place, the 7th belly scale down from the head. It's also supposed to have a crystal in it's forehead, called the Ulusunti. It's difficult to get hold of an Ulusunti, because you have to kill the original owner, the Uktena, and the only way to kill it is through that 7th belly scale, which one would imagine might be difficult to hold steady enough to hit with a giant snake bearing down on you ready to eat you.

There is a tale among the Cherokee of a Shawnee who was captured long ago by them, and lived among them. the Cherokee perceive of the Shawnee as having an inordinate number of powerful wizards among them, and this particular Shawnee was said to have killed an Uktena and obtained the Ulusunti crystal from it's head, and so went on to become a powerful shaman by virtue of owning that crystal. Such crystals are said to still be in the possession of some secretive individuals among the Cherokee. They are usually kept wrapped up, but must be taken out once a year and "fed", with the owner dropping a single drop of human blood, usually his own, on to the crystal which then absorbs the drop of blood, and is content until feeding time the next year.

Regardless of what started the stories, reality has a way of morphing into all manner of legend. Not far from where @"Mystic Wanderer" lives, there is a river, and at a bend in that river there is a cliff towering over the river bend. The cliff has vertical streaks of a white mineral showing in it, and the legend that has grown around that circumstance states that a Tlanuwha bird nests near the top of the cliff, and an Uktena lives in the hole of water below, in the river bend, and that there is constant warfare between the two. The white streaks are explained as bird excrement coming from the nesting area. It is said that the Uktena tries to climb to eat the Tlanuwha's nestlings or eggs (reminiscent of the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, a giant snake swallowing an egg), and the Tlanuwha dives from the cliff into the water to attempt to kill the Uktena. I found that story to be pretty similar to the one mentioned above that the Sioux tell, much farther west.

There are two rivers in west Virginia, one the Great Kanawha, and the other the Little Kanawha, that are said to have gotten their names from the Shawnee word for "it swallows", because the Shawnee said they were inhabited by Giant Horned Snakes that would eat the unwary passer-by. Another, more mundane explanation for the names, however, is that they were named after the Conoy tribe, an extinct tribe that once lived along their waters.

For reality, as opposed to legend, I can offer a couple of observations.

My Dear Old Dad grew up in the backwoods of West Virginia, which is almost entirely backwoods. He told me a tale on several occasions of a giant snake running through those woods in the summer of 1941. He said he never saw the snake himself, but that he DID see tracks it left in the dust of dirt roads, and that it looked like someone had dragged a 14 inch stove pipe in a serpentine pattern. He stood behind that tale until the day he died.

I myself saw what I would call a giant bird on two occasions, several years ago near Madison, NC. it wasn't so big as legends tell, nor was it as large as a teratorn, but it was the biggest bird I've ever seen with my own eyes. It was solid black, from beak to tail, with no off-color markings. it had a large, heavy beak, along the lines of what you would expect to see on an eagle, or perhaps a vulture. One one of the occasions I saw it, it was flying at treetop level and flew between two pine trees about half way down my driveway, which was around 100 yards long with trees on either side. As it flew between the pines, I noticed that each wingtip just touched the tops of two pines, so I marked the two pines and measured the distance between their bases, which was 12 feet, 6 inches center to center. It was some sort of bird of prey, but I'm familiar with all of the regular birds of prey there, which are loads of black vultures and turkey vultures, and the occasional Bald Eagle, and even rarer Golden Eagle. The largest wingspans among those birds belong to the turkey vulture and the golden eagle, neither of which exceeds about 7 feet tip to tip in a large example. Folks tell me that it was probably an over-sized Golden Eagle, and I'm prepared to accept that, but if that's what it was, it was a big-'un, almost twice the size of any of it's fellows.

For sheer size, the bird approached the size of a condor, of which there are  two varieties still living: the California Condor, and the Andean Condor. Their wingspans regularly fall into the 12 to 14 foot range, but the bird I saw was no condor. it didn't have the bald, featherless red head or the white neck ruffle of feathers that condors have. Either type of condor would have had to have been WAY off course, and far from home, to appear in the North Carolina woods, anyhow. Some folks believe that condors are the modern-day descendants of the teratorns of old.

So I can find a basis in personal experience for the legends, but I can't explain that basis.

Almost all of the Indian tribes had such legends of "Thunder Birds" and "Giant Horned Snakes", going back at least to the Mound Builder cultures - I posted a Mound Builder engraving of a Giant Horned Snake earlier, an American "Dragon". Here, they are generally associated with water, usually rivers and lakes, but the Shawnee believe they can even inhabit the brackish water that collects in tree stumps in the woods. There is no shortage of evidence for the Indian pan-tribal belief in them, going back for at least centuries. La Salle mentioned an engraving of a giant "Piasa Bird" that natives had carved into a cliff face of the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois, during his trip down the Mississippi in the 1600's.

As far south as the Aztec and Mayan cultures, they had legends of giant winged or feathered serpents - the Aztecs worshiped one called "Quetzalcoatl", and the same entity was named "Kukulcan" among the Maya.

Legends usually have a basis in something more concrete, but often grow in the telling over generations.

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[BIAD]

In Merry-Olde England, yer' flyin' lizards abided here too!

[Bally002]

New Aussie pterodactyl, 'Butch's ironstone dragon', may ..-

A reasonable read perhaps pertaining to this thread.

An Aussie pterodactyl nicknamed the 'ironstone dragon.'  Fossil of course.

Kind regards,

Bally:)

[Ninurta]

In Merry-Olde England, yer' flyin' lizards abided here too!

Let's not forget Erwin's Wyrm - that thing looked suspiciously dragon-like to me!

Now, these Knuckers - have y'all still got 'em around? I ask because I have pointy stick, will travel... when covid restrictions are lifted, that is, and assuming they haven't put me on some kind of no-fly listing...

I've always wanted a dragon head to mount on the wall in my living room, and there ain't none left here since Dear Old Dad killed 'em off...

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[guohua]

New Aussie pterodactyl, 'Butch's ironstone dragon', may ..-

A reasonable read perhaps pertaining to this thread.

An Aussie pterodactyl nicknamed the 'ironstone dragon.'  Fossil of course.

Kind regards,

Bally:)

That's interesting, lived until, wait was it, 90 million years ago.

[guohua]

In Merry-Olde England, yer' flyin' lizards abided here too!

These Knuckers Dragons, has any bones been found?
Or is this like the bones of Giants found in America and other places, the Smithsonian destroys or hides the evidence.
We hear about Dragons from every culture, so you would think they were actually Dragons here, but where's the evidence? 
Could this be Evidence!?!?

 I agree with her, it looks fake, like a movie prop.
Now what do any of you think of this find in the below video.

[Ninurta]

Chinese dragons on film - 

1, Five different videos:




2.Pretty sure this one is CGI - a Chinese Dragon with wings?:




3. Definitely CGI - says so right in the title:



4. Similar to one of the above videos, but the wings are more raggedy:





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[Bally002]

'Draco' or the gliding lizard.

There are many species particularly in Asia and while they don't flap wings some have been recorded soaring across some 200 feet.

I wonder if perhaps they may have served imagination in legends.  Maybe thought to be hatchlings of dragons living in the jungle and gliding from tree to tree.












A study by Attenborough for viewing.


Flying Lizards Soar Like Dragons - Planet Earth II

Just my thoughts on the subject.

Kind regards,

Bally:)

[WonderCow]

I've always wanted a dragon head to mount on the wall in my living room, and there ain't none left here since Dear Old Dad killed 'em off...

.

You mean something like this?

Dragon trophies

I must admit, I started making one, I've had a half finished head and neck languishing on the coffee table for a couple of years now. Didn't help that I got a copy of his book after I started making it and found I'd gone about it all wrong.