Introduction
Just a few years ago, sightings of dragons were quite common. Ordinary people saw them; so did kings, knights, archbishops, and monks.
Scholars wrote about them.
It was only about 400 years ago, when scientists began the enormous task of identifying all the known animals, that anyone even began to doubt the existence of dragons. Today most scientists say that dragons never existed. There is imply no proof. So what exactly were dragons that people claimed to see?
First of all, it must be remembered that scientific understanding was not the same then as it is today. If the sky rumbled with thunder, and was then filled with flashes of lighting, someone might easily believe that a dragon was flying by. Or if a wandering traveler saw smoke and fire belching from a distant volcano, what else could it be but a dragon?
Imagine Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, the first European to travel overland to the Far East, as he came across a crocodile for the first time. His description- and an artists rendering made at the time-was exactly like a dragon. Or suppose someone found gigantic footprints or fossilized bones long before the facts about dinosaurs were understood. It is no wonder that people could believe in dragons. Many present-day lizards look very dragonlike. Most of them are small, but there is a type of giant lizard that was discovered on the Indonesian island of Komodo in 1912. It grows up to nine feet long and stands three feet high. It feeds mostly on goats, pigs, and deer, but it is known to have eaten humans.
Its saliva is poisonous and its breath more foul than that of any other creature on Earth.
It lays eggs and has a forked tongue. Naturally, this lizard is known as the Komodo dragon, Although it is not the winged dragon of fame and legend, it does give hope to those who still want to believe that dragons live!!
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