When asked what dragons are, people will usually evoke images of ferocious creatures that battle knights, guard gold or breathe fire. These beasts may resemble dinosaurs or even have some bird-like features and are often wingless, but they will also carry the inflections of the cultures that conjured them.
In China, for instance, dragons (lung) are a symbol of activity and maleness in the yin-yang of Chinese cosmology, while they represent heaven in Daoism. In Europe, dragons are more sinister, the kind of creature paraded around in the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, or in the story of Merlin. And in modern fiction, the dragon reaches new levels of sophistication and characterization: Smaug in The Hobbit is cunning and intelligent; Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon is loving and protective; and the dragon in Game of Thrones is both terrifying and noble.
If dragons are real, they probably lived in marine ecosystems and would have been able to “fly” through the epicontinental oceans of the Cretaceous. They could have used their tails to strangle prey or even whales and they would have had one of the strongest bite forces of any animal on record.
They may also have squirted boiling-hot, noxious chemicals into the air like a squid or a skunk to deter predators. In the case of fire-breathing, we have a possible candidate in the tiny Bombardier Beetle, which releases a spray of burning hot, noxious chemicals when threatened.
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