Dragon Devolving

From earliest childhood I have pondered the origin of the idea of the dragon—this outsized, monstrous creature with a body composed of amalgamated features of the most terrifying animals: serpents, lions, eagles, raptors...Dinosaurs might have served as the model for these gigantic monsters construed as dragons. But, since dinosaurs died out 66 billion years ago from the impact of an enormous meteor, and the earliest human ancestors date from 11 million years ago, it is unlikely that there was ever any human experience with living dinosaurs. There was surely contact with mammoth size animals during the migrations of modern humans across the globe. These animals went extinct from human hunting perhaps somewhere around the time that dragon myths began to appear.

"...the promise of mastering the beast still resonates."

Dragons generated mostly inglorious myths about their abhorrence of humans and, also, the desire for humans to vanquish them. For centuries various cultures promulgated stories of heroic defeats and destructions of dragons.Today dragons have undergone a media-created program of taming, perhaps inspired by the dramatic taming of wild horses or even of the eons-old domestication of dogs snd cats. Making feral creatures subject to human will may have fostered the grand idea of the social mastery of beasts of prey.The appeal of the dragon lives on. Powerful, ferocious, extremely aggressive— the promise of mastering the beast still resonates. Just check popular media.