Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Dragons Are Dinosaurs Aerodactyl used Dragon Breath!
Clay: Can't you speak to her? You're practically one of those critters!
Dojo: I beg your pardon!! That's like saying you're practically a monkey! She's prehistoric, and that's offensive to dragons! Just because she speaks with a British accent doesn't make her smart! We breathe fire, fly, and chew with our mouths closed!
This is a good example of a trope that appears to be changing from one thing to another. Basically, some people just can't get over how similar some dinosaurs are to dragons.
Both are big lizardy things, right? They're already so similar, why not have all dinosaurs be fearsome carnivores? Because hey — big lizard things just have to eat meat, just like dragons! And if they ever meet with humans, they must messily devour them all! Just like dragons!
And while we're at it, why not associate dinosaurs with lava-spewing volcanoes? Or even give them the ability to breathe fire? It'd be a shame not to, right?
This is especially prevalent in pulp adventure novels, B-movies, and video games set in Prehistoric worlds where Everything's Trying To Kill You.
There is a bit more justification for this confusion in Eastern media; it's largely due to a long-standing translation mixup. When people discovered fossil bones in ancient China, they figured they were dragon bones (to be more precise, bones shed by dragons who have achieved their final, fully airborne forms). Therefore, the words for "dragon" and "prehistoric creature" in most Asian languages are very similar, and sometimes it's simply used to refer to both dinosaurs and dragons. This goes a long * "long" is Chinese for dragon # Not "lung"? way to explain why many Chinese dinosaurs have dragon-derived names. Not to mention why, especially in videogames, dinosaur-like creatures have fire-breathing abilities and dragon-like creatures are identified as dinosaurs.
The Western origins of this trope are a bit more complicated. It may have something to do with the popular notion that associates ancient times with loads and loads of flame-spewing volcanoes. (There was a lot of volcanic activity during the Cretaceous, but it certainly was nowhere near as violent as depicted in fiction, and it had more to do with poison gas than rivers of lava and hellfire raining down everywhere.) Take a look at early paleo-art and you'll not only see tons of lava, but also many dinosaurs who look suspiciously like dragons wandering in this hellish, primeval, pre- human landscape. Some art critics, like W. J. T. Mitchell, have wondered if the older "tripod stance" seen in early depictions of bipedal dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex is meant to at least subconsciously bring to mind images of the Biblical " upright serpent". Speaking of, this trope probably has some relationship with the belief, held by both certain creationists and some cryptozoologists, that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction and inspired the stories of dragons. Kent Hovind goes so far as to say that some species "must" have breathed fire (because the Bible mentions dragons) and may still exist in some Lost World in The Amazon or somewhere.
The older version of the trope is gradually becoming more and more discredited as it filters into the pop-culture consciousness that dinosaurs, really, were just another kind of animal. The newer version comes at the issue from a different angle: now it's more like Dragons Are Dinosaurs. This is based on the fact that quite a few anthropologists are convinced that all of the legends of fantastic beasts could only have been based upon misinterpreted fossils. (This was certainly the case for a few legends, but surely not all of them.) At least one anthropologist has dropped the other shoe and proposed that dragon legends have to be based upon (get a cold drink and a comfy seat) long-held "Racial Memories" of dinosaurs. (Just so we are clear, these would have to go back to the tree-shrew days.) In any case, look for fantasy worlds where wizards are finding dragon fossils and local legendary dragons who turn out to be surviving dinosaurs (you wonder how many of the latter are inspired by the true story of the Komodo Dragon).
See also Our Dragons Are Different, Here There Were Dragons, Reptiles Are Abhorrent, Giant Flyer, and (naturally) Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- In the Yu-Gi-Oh! Anime, Dragons are dinosaurs... sort of. Rex Raptor has a dinosaur Theme Deck. However, his two strongest monsters, Serpent Night Dragon and Red Eyes Black Dragon, are dragons. Possibly justified as dragons are not affected by the arbitrary dinosaur weakness, and Rex may even be exploiting the confusion here. (In the Yu-Gi-Oh! verse, a two-headed dragon is identified as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Um, yeah.)
- The card game, however, distinguishes between dragons and dinosaurs by making them two entirely different types (Dragon-type and Dinosaur-type). For quite a while since the start of the game, there were very few Dinosaur-type monsters, and it was years before a particularly powerful one was released.
- For some reason, almost all of the Dinosaur-type monsters in the various Yu-Gi-Oh! video games are shown breathing fire for their attacks.
- Rex specifically notes that the Serpent Night Dragon and the Red Eyes Black Dragon are his special rare cards (he won the Serpent Night Dragon at a tournament), which makes them an acceptable exception to his dinosaur-themed deck. He's just showing off by having them - and ends up losing both anyway.
- Digimon is full of dinosaur/dragon characters that can breathe fire. One is usually the main Mon of each season. The WallBangery happens when the Mon calls himself a dinosaur in some episodes and a dragon in others. (Guilmon was a major offender here if this Troper is remembering things right.)
- There are actually several Digimon that go by this rule— one particularly bad offender is Cannondramon, a Dragon type Cyborg Digimon... who looks like a diplodocus with rail guns strapped to its back.
- Justified in Guilmon's case; he's an Ascended Fanboy's drawing come to life, and not very intelligent to begin with.
- Dinosaur King is an... interesting attempt to make a generic Mon show with actual animals. It was even weirder to see them change shape, breathe fire, and perform "electric tackles".
Films
- Godzilla is either a dragon or a dinosaur depending on which fan you ask. Indeed, the fantastic nature of most Kaiju sways from one extreme to the other depending on the movie. The original film says that he's a dinosaur who was resurrected and mutated by the miracle of atomic mutation and he just happened to fit into the local dragon mythology.
- His origin is given much more clearly in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah which reveals he really is a mutated dinosaur that became a legendary figure.
- The confusion among American fans, at least, is probably due to the American dub of Godzilla Raids Again. In it, an educational film reel explained that dinosaurs, including Godzilla (then called Gigantis) and Anguirus, were created from pools of burning lava and sulfur, resulting in their being walking fire elementals of sorts. So... yeah.
- And they dominated the earth during the "age of fire", whenever that was.
- The Back To The Future ride at Universal Studios stopped short of having its Tyrannosaurus Rex breath fire — but had it looking very dragony and living in the heart of an active volcano. Because animals like to live inside volcanoes.
- Oddly, Fantasia may have a lot to do with the volcano subtrope. "Rite of Spring" begins with a seemingly endless field of lava-spewing volcanoes. A short and easily missed transition shows the progress of life on Earth and then suddenly cuts to an extended scene set during the late Cretaceous. Given that this is one of the most influential dinosaur film moments ever, perhaps many people missed the transition....
- This was translated over into "real" life in 1966 when Disneyland added the animatronic Primeval World diorama to their Disneyland Railroad attraction. In the Diorama, a T. rex is depicted fighting a Stegosaurus in the midst of (of course) a volcanic landscape.
Literature
- Several years earlier than Dragons A Fantasy Made Real (enough to wonder if a lawsuit could be justified), Peter Dickinson's book The Flight Of Dragons took the view that dragons were long-surviving prehistoric creatures — though not necessarily dinosaurs. He provides plausible means whereby dragons could be huge, breathe fire, have a reason to hoard gold, and so on, all based on the mechanism whereby they flew. He even sketches out an evolutionary path, and provides a reason why neither fossils nor cave paintings of dragons should exist.
- One character in the Drenai books by David Gemmell remembers "dragon" skeletons that he saw in a museum, while thinking that it was impossible for such animals to breathe fire without burning their own long throats. Given that we're dealing with quite low Low Fantasy here, it is implied that he saw just a mundane dinosaur fossil.
- The Kill All Humans aspect is ubiquitous in pulp fiction. Authors seemed to like portraying every dinosaur species, including triceratops and stegosaurs, as carnivorous. Not only that, but both the legitimate carnivores and the derailed herbivores appear to prefer humans over any other potential prey.
- And mention must be made of a Tarzan novel in which our hero meets a Stegosaurus who can fly (using its spikey things as aerofoils, of course).
- Interestingly, in more recent years, some paleontologists (such as Greg Paul and Mark Witton
 ) have suggested that at least some ceratopsians habitually added some protein to their diet; carrion and maybe even small animals. There's direct fossil evidence for omnivory in at least one ceratopsian, Psittacosaurus. So a meat-eating Triceratops isn't that outlandish; it's just that it would be more similar to the same behavior in wild boar. (Of course, the obsession with eating humans is still silly, and the flying Stegosaurus thing is just hilarious.)
- In the Robert Heinlein novel Glory Road, the heroes encounter a dragon in the Medieval European Fantasy world they are in. The novel presents the dragon as a dinosaur which due to evolutionary traits (a high sulfur content in its body) had the ability to breath fire.
- While the dragons in Bone come in all shapes and sizes, some literally look like dinosaurs with wings attached to them, most notably a T-Rex, a Stegosaur and a sauropod.
- Played with in Larry Niven's Warlock universe where, as mana is used up, the magical great dragons die off and metamorphose into rocky skeletons embedded in the rocks and stones of the mountains.
- Percy Jackson And The Olympians claims that not only are all dinosaurs dragons, but that Tyrannosaurus Rex specifically is a powerful dragon. Commence wall banging.
- It seemed to this troper that the book claims some dinosaurs were dragons, and that Tyrannosaurus in particular was the dragon that Cadmus slew and grew soldiers from its teeth.
- Conan encounters what he calls a dragon (clearly an - unaccountably predatory - Stegosaurus from the description) in the Robert E Howard story Red Nails. It is later revealed to have been reanimated from fossils by magic.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- The first World Of Darkness played this straight in the mythos of Werewolf The Apocalypse. One of the species of Changing Breeds are the Mokolé. Nominally, they're weregators, except for the fact that, since they serve as Gaia's Memory, their War Form can be anything sufficiently lizardy drawn from earthly history. Most of them go for dinosaurs, but there are Eastern variants that can become dragons.
- Dungeons & Dragons, naturally, subverts this. Dinosaurs are nothing more than animals, though they're cool enough that they aren't listed in one appendix in the Monster Manual, where animals normally are, but instead under their own heading. Which makes D officially (and suitably) the most feared section of all creature books for D, what with dragons, demons, devils and dinosaurs.
- Some of the dragon-related source books take an interesting approach to this issue by suggesting that dragons may be evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, sixty-millions-years on. (This might be more plausible if Young Earth Creationists weren't absolutely right in most D&D worlds.)
- In the latest D&D books, dinosaurs were renamed "behemoths", in an effort to avoid anachronisms. In the 4th edition Monster Manual, we have a "Bloodspike Behemoth" (a Stegosaurus), and a "Macetail Behemoth" (an Ankylosaurus). So the D section lost a little coolness (but remains filled with Dragons, Devils, Demons, Dracoliches, Dragonspawn, etc., etc., etc.).
- And Drakes, which includes a few Dromaeosauridae in addition to more fantastic creatures.
- Castle Falkenstein is set in a parallel 19th century, replete with magic. Dragons are part of the political scene and are known to be the descendants of pterosaurs who survived the extinction of the dinosaurs by developing intelligence and magic.
- In Exalted, the Dragon Kings are actually human-sized, sentient, armored, super-intelligent, enlightened, elementally-powered saurians who wield Aztec-like crystal clubs and swords. Oh, yes.
Video Games
- In the Adventure Island franchise, one of the ridable dinosaurs has fire breath as his power.
- The Tyranno boss in Chrono Trigger, for some odd reason, breathes fire.
- This isn't that absurd. First, the reptites were biotech specialists. Second, a few 'dinosaur' creatures had breathed fire already. For those of you asking to justify that... it's a magic world. What's so surprising about an animal processing that somehow?
- Yoshi of the Super Mario Bros. series was referred to as a dragon and a dinosaur interchangeably in Nintendo publications early on, although Nintendo seems to have mastered the distinction now. He can't breathe fire on his own, but an occasional power-up can give him that ability.
- Yoshi's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl puts him firmly in dragon territory — he grows wings, becomes invincible, and flies around the screen breathing fire. It's even called the "Super Dragon".
- Also, in Super Mario World (which introduced Yoshi to the series), when Mario or Luigi stomps on a Dino-Rhino on Chocolate Island, it shrinks and becomes a Dino-Torch, which breathes fire upward.
- Mention must also be made of the SMW boss called "Reznor" (huh?) He is/It is/They are four fireball-spitting Dino Rhinos spinning on a waterwheel.
- Tricky the sorta-Styracosaurus in Star Fox Adventures breathes fire and burrows underground.
- Pokemon both uses and averts this trope. While it is possible to teach many of the dinosaur-like Pokémon in the series to breathe fire, naturally learned that fire breathing is left to Fire Pokémon and the actual Dragons. Also, it is possible to teach fire-breathing to many other creatures that bear no resemblance to dragons or dinosaurs.
- Final Fantasy VI had an infamous translation error where the Japanese word for "dinosaur" (kyoryu) was translated literally as "frightful dragon" — in a part of the game where the player's goal was to find dragons, causing much confusion.
- Is this the part where the people in the Cave on the Veldt talked about the dragon that lived in the forest (where the player can find dinosaurs as random encounters)?
- In addition, the Brachiosaur and the Tyrannosaur were spellcasters for no apparent reason. The Brachiosaur could cast the powerful Ultima spell, as well as the Status-inducing "Disaster" spell, and was generally death on legs. The Tyrannosaur could cast Meteor. And the sprites for the two were used (with similar colors even) for two actual dragons: Tyrannosaur ? Earth Dragon, Brachiosaur ? Gold Dragon.
- The Ice Dragon has the same sprite as the Vectaur, a small, vaguely dinosaur-like enemy that can be encountered in Kefka's tower.
- Final Fantasy XII somewhat rationalizes this by defining the dragon genus as an overarching term for most large reptiles, so including the more traditional wyrms and wyverns and the more historical theropods in the same evolutionary chain.
- In Dragon Spirit for the TurboGrafx16, many land-based enemies are dinosaurs that spit fireballs at you.
- In Medievil 2, the skeletal dinosaur boss breathes fire.
- Pop'n Music has a character called Dino, who is a fire-breathing dinosaur.
- Averted in the game EVO Search For Eden, where the dinosaurs are... just dinosaurs. Although one of the "hidden forms" you could briefly take was a flying horned dragon. To acquire this powerful One Winged Angel form, you'll have to turn into a bird, so technically this dragon is a dinosaur.
- Tales Of Symphonia pokes fun at this trope in a science academy which contains the assembled skeleton of a dragon on display. A nearby scholar indicates that it was a prehistoric creature that lived long ago. Nevertheless, many varieties of real, living dragons exist in the game, including both winged and non-winged varieties, some of which have even been domesticated for human use. Unfortunately for the scientists, they all live in places that they are unlikely to ever see.
- What are you talking about "never see"? There are Wyverns right outside the town....
- In Tales Of Eternia, one can encounter dinosaurs. They're big green lizardy things with tiny arms and lots of teeth. Also, they breathe fire. Making it worse, elsewhere, one can find actual dragons, which are exactly like red Dinosaurs with tiny wings.
- Not fire, Phlogiston. Remember, these are old-fashioned creatures.
- Misuzu Kamio of Eternal Fighter Zero can summon various fire-breathing (stuffed) dinosaurs with her "Gao Gao Fire" super. Sure, they're just stuffed animals, but still....
- King Dodongo from The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
- As well as Helmasaur King of A Link to the Past.
- One of the versions of the second Mega Man Star Force game is "Fire Dinosaur". They changed it to "Fire Saurian" in the US release, probably thinking nobody would know what it meant, and even if they did, they wouldn't care. They were right.
- The Dragos of Mother 3 are simply regular dinosaurs. The one Drago that falls victim to the Pig Army's chimerization plot gains the ability to breathe fire. (Though from the looks of its sprite, it appears that they just shoved a flamethrower down its throat.)
- One of the characters in the '94 arcade game Primal Rage is a fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus rex named Diablo. Of course, he's a Chaotic Evil god in the shape of a T. rex, so he at least has a justification for it.
- The title character of the Sega Genesis/Super Nintendo game Radical Rex breathes fire as his main weapon.
- The Tyrannosaurus rex boss from Turok breathes fire, not to mention he also shoots lasers and has armor plating. The again, he is a cyborg dinosaur.
- In the first Devil May Cry game, two puzzles require defeating fire-breathing dragons. Said dragons are basically T. rex skeletons that spit fireballs at you. (But then again, this is Devil May Cry.)
- Mostly averted in Warcraft games. There are several creatures that look like dinosaurs or other prehistoric reptiles, most notably devilsaurs (T. rex with some spines on their back), raptors, treshadons (plesiosaur-lookalikas) and stegadons (stegosaur-like creatures with a large horned head instead of a tiny one like the real things had). Most don't breathe fire, but many stegadon variants (called thunder lizards) shoot lightning out of their horn.
- A lot of these are commonly found in areas with lots of lava
- In world of warcraft, dinosaurs are clearly labeled "beasts" instead of "dragonkin". Also, just to be fair, while few people know this, it is heavily implied in some tauren quests that the "thunder lizards" (lightning shooting stegodons) are not dinosaurs, but magical beasts (that Blizz just used the stegodon model for) of an entirely different sort.
- Thunder Lizards appeared a game earlier than the other varieties, so that seems unlikely.
- According to Touhou, dragons are an ancient race nearly on the same level as the Yaoyorozu no Kami (8 million deities). According to Morichika Rinnosuke in the source material Curiosities of Lotus Asia, the world outside of Gensokyo has been re-naming dragon fossils as various types of dinosaurs.
- Fossil Fighters explicitly explains that the revived animals (which include more than just dinosaurs) gained superpowers as a side-effect of the cloning process, which is why that T-rex is breathing fire and that Dilophosaurus is shooting out gallons of water.
- The devs also admitted in an interview that they did this due to the Rule Of Fun: "If we were to make it realistic, the only things the dinosaurs could do is either bite or stomp. That's why we gave each dinosaur attributes like fire or water, because we thought it would be fun to play if they breathed fire and stuff."
Web Comics
- The fan-winged dragons in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob evolved from Kuehneosaurus (a real-life lizard that lived in the Triassic and which had "wings" formed from overlong ribs which extended out from its body; it is believed to have used these to parachute from trees). The dragons destroyed their civilization in a war — wiping out the dinosaurs in the process — after which they became peaceful, pastoral creatures. Millions of years later, when human knights and hunters began "slaying" them, they revived their old technology and left Earth for the planet Butane in the Kuiper Belt.
- In this Bad Gods comic, a character tries in vain to explain the difference between dinosaurs and dragons.
Western Animation
- The Dinobots' trademark attack is fire breath; Slag (the Triceratops) actually had "Flamethrower" as his official assigned function. (Well, at least they're robots.) The ones in Animated also breathed fire and were made from animatronic dinosaurs, but they weren't suppose to have it; it was something Megatron, who was working with an unwitting Sumdac, added the so they would have a weapon.
- The Megatron from Beast Wars started as a Tyrannosaurus, but somehow (thanks to the original Megatron's spark and a lava dunking) gained a huge dragon form near the end of the series. The fact that he's a robot makes it a little easier to take, but considering they created their beast modes using scanned DNA, the dragon really comes out of nowhere.
- I always figured that when he was in the lava his beast mode was corrupted and he automatically scanned a new one from a dragon skeleton in the lava (through the magic of the original Megatron's spark, of course). I mean, Optimus got a tank mode and a jet mode. Makes sense, doesn't it? Well, I was 9 at the time, and for a 9 year old thats a badass assumption.
- And then there's Deathsaurus (or whichever of his 5+ names you want to call him), whose alt mode is somewhere between a dragon and a giant chicken...
- Extremely evident in Gumby, where Prickle would claim to be a dragon in some episodes (and even breathe fire), and insist he was a dinosaur in others.
- What makes the inconsistency especially stupid is that there's a whole episode devoted to him proving he's a dinosaur so he can get into an ice cream parlor that doesn't allow dragons (because they melt the ice cream).
- While the series has other problems, The Flintstones had a dino/dragon who doubled as a lighter or an oven. ("It's a living...")
- The subtler versions of this trope pop up a few times in the DC Animated Universe. The standout scene for this troper is the one where a time-traveling supervillain dumps one of his minions in the... Cretaceous? Said minion gets to briefly enjoy a vista where a family of Brachiosaurs are swimming in lava before Rocks Fall and Everyone Dies.
- Gargoyles probably deserves a mention here due to Greg Weisman's Shrug Of God in response to the question, "What kind of animal are Gargoyles classified as?":
"Going by evolution, the gargoyles descended from a species that is often classified along with dinosaurs, without necessarily being dinosaurs." - from here
- ... birds?
- More like pterosaurs/pterodactyls actually, if they are indeed intended being related to dinosaurs without belong within the group
Real Life
- The skull of the pachycephalosaur Dracorex hogwartsia is housed at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Its name, which means "Hogwarts' Dragon King", was voted on by fans of Harry Potter. Most visitors probably see past the name.
- Several Chinese dinosaurs have "long", the Mandarin word for "dragon", in their names, i.e. Dilong paradoxus, Guanlong wucaii, Mei long, Yinlong downsi, and Tianyulong confuciusi. The Chinese word for dinosaur, in fact, is "konglong" ("fearsome dragon.") There's also an oviraptorosaur called Hagryphus ("Ha's gryphon") and Welsh prosauropod called... Pantydraco... (It's... probably not what it sounds like.)
- Related to the Dragons Are Dinosaurs version of this trope (although nobody could mistake them for dragons): Homo floresiensis almost instantaneously gained the nickname "Hobbit". A significant number of anthropologists are convinced that a lost race of small people have to be the basis for little people legends, and absolutely not dwarfism or, uh, people using their imaginations. You could almost hear their collective triumphant shouts of, "See! See!!!"
- Never mind the rather inconvenient fact that legends of little people range farther and wider than the one very small and isolated area in south-east Asia where the fossils that "must" have inspired them were found. (And come to think of it, you can say the same for unicorns, gryphons and dragons.)
- However, before a few years ago, those fossils weren't known from anywhere at all. Just because they've only been found on Flores so far doesn't mean that was the only place they lived. Also, I've only seen them used to explain the local little people legend (the orang pendek, which sounds much more like a real creature — without the metalworking skill and stuff attached to, say, Norse dwarf legends).
- Though to a point, this can be justified by word getting around (Europeans hear from Arabs who heard from Persians who heard from... about a species of four-legged animal with a horn sticking out of its head). But only to a point.
- At least this one is physically possible, as Homo Floresiensis existed at the same time as us.
- Adrienne Mayor argues that fossil discoveries are the source for all the myths about giants, gryphons, and (of course) dragons in her books. It should be said that she has received quite a bit of flack for some of her theories.
- Specifically, if you value your life, don't bring up the Gryphons Are Protoceratops theory. Though to be fair, the Mediterranean Gryphon —the subject of the theory— is rather different from the modern, highly symbolic Mix And Match Critter we're all familiar with. (Ducks and covers...)
- In a related example, it is said that in ancient China, alchemists often ground dinosaur fossils into powders and used them in traditional herbal medicine believing them to be dragon bones.
- Not just dinosaur fossils, any fossil seems to qualift for "dragon bone" status (Many of them are actually mammal fossils. iirc, the first Gigantopithecus specimens were discovered this way)
- Kent "Dr Dino" Hovind claims that dinosaurs were dragons, breathed fire, rode on Noah's Ark and may still be alive in remote places (and was possibly the inspiration for the Waterloo Road example above). That even other creationists don't want much to do with Hovind's hypotheses should give you an idea how crazy they are.
- Though the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky cites dragon legends from around the world as proof that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.
- Some creation-scientists speculate that Parasaurolophus breathed fire because it ate swamp plants which might have produced flammable gases, and its nostrils were lined with bone and connected to its crest(and therefore could have been used to shoot out fire without harming the creature). Of course even claiming that it ate swamp plants is a bad case of Did Not Do The Research — or did the research, but stopped when they hit everything published after 1975. Hadrosaurs had large numbers of teeth clearly designed to grind up tough vegetation. Furthermore their body structure is not very well suited for life in a swampy area. Oh, and, shooting flames through a horn on your head that has a channel inside directly connected to your respiratory system probably freakin' stings.
- The Jack Chick tract "There Go The Dinosaurs" uses this belief, complete with a helpful footnote reading: "In 1841, [dragons] were renamed 'dinosaurs'!"
- Proof that we're not making this up here. Expect much WallBangery.
- It's worth mentioning at this point that the Bible does mention Dragons in a few places — but most scholars have figured out that the word is used to mean "an animal that I have never seen before and can't describe" (perhaps "monster" or "alien" would be a closer translation). Most of the "Dragons" have turned out to be jackals!
- ... Probably not the Behemoth and Leviathin mentioned in Job, used as illustrations to show Job how small and pathetic he was. Most of which was (presumably) speaking as if Job would already know what the creatures were.
- Though that doesn't stop creationists from claiming they are, though.
- This troper has a collection of stuffed animals he uses to entertain small children with a ventriloquist show, and a running gag features one of the dragon characters insisting that his friend the dinosaur is a dragon. Another dragon character corrects him: "That dinosaur!", which by the end of the show becomes a Catch Phrase that the kids are encouraged to shout out loud.
- The Japanese word for "dinosaur", kyōryū, literally means "frightful dragon".
- iirc, the Japanese word for "pterosaur" includes "dragon" in it as well.
|
|
