Briefs · Frontier Science
Whence dragons?
Dragons are not real. That is the least interesting thing about them.
Nature has dug into its archive, fifty years back, to ask where dragons come from: the ecology and evolution of winged legendary beasts, filed alongside monkeys that show their behinds to their buddies. It is the odd couple of the week — mythical reptiles and very real primate etiquette — and both raise the same question: how much of nature is biology, and how much is story?
Fifty years on, the question still lands. Every culture invents a flying, fire-breathing lizard, then asks science to explain it. The archive does not settle the matter. It just shows we have been asking for a very long time.
Conclusion: dragons are not zoology. They are gossip with wings.
Read the original at Nature News
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