RationalWiki:EvoWiki/Talk:Dragons were dinosaurs

Ancients and fossils
Fossils are not a new phenomenon. Long before we called them "dinosaurs," it's very likely that humans would have stumbled across fossils. Lacking an explanation for the giant, preserved bones, footprints, and eggs, surely these humans would have come up with their own, makeshift, fantastical explanations, much in the way that many myths were used to explain other natural phenomena in lieu of modern scientific understanding. Why couldn't dragon myths simply be the result of accidental fossil discoveries, of dinosaurs or other unknown, extinct creatures? There are even several publicized cases of such explanations in the modern era - For example, in 2007, villagers in Henan Province, China, were discovered to be boiling up dinosaur bones in soup. They mistakenly believed these bones to have come from "dragons" and to have medicinal properties: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6276948.stm I'm very surprised that these possibilities are completely absent on these pages, since they take a rational approach to the origins of myths rather than simply ignoring them... --74.103.150.125 (talk) 00:24, 24 June 2011 (UTC)