In a way.
Depictions resembling terror birds, which aren’t much different from dinosaur raptors, have been found in ancient texts concerning “dragons.” Man definitely met giant terrestrial birds in SE Asia, the Pacific, and America and maybe even Eurasia.
Man also met giant flying birds with wingspans of 30 feet. Though the terratorns lived in S. America and would not have contributed to Eurasian dragon legends, we aren’t entirely sure when massive sea birds went extinct. They may have inspired stories of rocs and dragons too.
And birds are technically dinosaurs.
The pig dragons of Ancient China (Hongshan Culture) may have been based on the fossils of certain small sauropod dinosaurs with known fossil beds along the Yellow River.
However, the same culture’s dragon sculptures remind us of the so called “Sirrush” dragon of Babylon. This Sumerian dragon is considered the first known western dragon depiction, but it looks most like a pangolin relative. Pangolins the size of horses roamed Mesolithic Asia, and maybe much later. Though pangolins are armor plated and scaly, they aren’t dinosaurs they’re mammals’.
In many cultures dragons and giant snakes are the same thing, and much bigger snakes existed in ancient times.
Snakes were associated with dragons because of their instinctive knowledge of earthquakes and volcanos, and giant salamanders were associated with volcanos because they’re often found in volcanic lakes. Modern giant salamanders grow to 8 feet and can live 200 years in the wild. In polynesia and in some parts of ancient China, there are stories of virgin sacrifice or mock-sacrifice to dragons who live in volcanos and control the rain.
The Australian aborigines also believed that giant snakes underground controlled the rain.
In parts of ancient China, any breed of horse over 9 feet was considered a dragon.
SE Asia was often considered a place of dragons in both Western and Chinese myth. There have been ginat monitor lizards there since 100,000 years ago…some reaching over 25 foot long. Their breath was “poisonous” and “hot as fire,” just like the earliest Western description of a dragon states.
“Hot as fire” does not mean “fire,” but later writers took their liberties I guess.
Also there were giant turtles in the Pacific with horns and clubbed tales until relatively recently (5000 years ago or later). Like glyptodonts, they are thought to be examples of “convergent evolution” with akylosaur dinosaurs. However, the Pantestudine clade these turtles have been put into is a “wastebasket taxon.” There’s little to link them to other turtles except that they are “anapsids,” which is really no longer a valid reason for association. Some ankylosaurs became anapsids before the YKT Event, and fenestrae counting is no longer a valid criteria. Their skulls are almost identical to late ankylosaurs, not just the tail clubs and horns. All we’ve found of them is skulls, shells, and tails. There is just as big a time gap between them and their supposed turtle-like ancestor as there is between them and ankylosaurs, and they may have more in common. Several species of ankylosaur were fully aquatic and had plastrons, just like turtles.
So who knows we might be talking dinosaurs after all.
Finally, the giant sloth and armadillo evolved from an ancestor with an osteoderm (armor) that burrowed underground. It’s only assumed that the sloth’s fur fully covered its armor.
And we’re just talking about the megafauna we have fossils for here. That’s only about a third of the megafauna we know probably existed during the Paleolithic and later.
So who can truly say? It’s not as crazy as many think, if seen from an informed perspective.
Do you think dragons were actually dinosaurs that escaped extinction until humans eliminated them?
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