Come Fly with Me on Mythological Wings: Part One

Mythology is full of strange winged creatures, some of them humanoid. If these creatures are not native to Earth, that is they are really real, not mythological, but extraterrestrial, is there anything really implausible at work here? There’s nothing implausible about wings – obviously – even when extrapolated to beings our size or larger. There are just three variables at work here, sheer oomph muscle power; the density of what you’re flying in; and gravity. With the right combination, all sort of flying creatures not native to Earth might be possible.

There are lots and lots of really real winged creatures – birds, bats, insects, and in prehistoric times flying reptiles like pterosaurs/pterodactyls. One might even count ‘flying’ fish or ‘flying’ foxes or squirrels if one had a broad enough definition of ‘flying’. But just because you have wings of course doesn’t of necessity mean you can fly. There are lots of terrestrial flightless birds for example yet they still have wings.

There are also a lot of mythological creatures that fly – the griffin (or gryphon – alt spelling), the dragon, and on and on and on. One can’t of course forget Pegasus, the flying winged horse as one of those.

Now perhaps these are real terrestrial animals. Alas, despite lots of eyewitness accounts, there are no dead bodies available for examination or any other fossil evidence for them.

Or perhaps they are misinterpretations of real, or once real, terrestrial animals. In that latter case, dragons or griffins are misinterpretations of fossils. That’s highly unlikely IMHO. Perfectly intact, fully articulated, fully exposed large winged reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs are as rare as hen’s teeth. Any vertebrate palaeontologist would probably sell their soul to the Devil for such a find.  The norm is for much of any vertebrate fossil skeleton to have substantial bits missing; what remains is usually in a jumbled state; and near all of it is buried and out of sight. 

Perhaps they are really real, but not of this Earth, that is to say, they are extraterrestrial, or in other words, alien life forms. That’s the most likely scenario IMHO. 

But of course the most logical explanation is that they are, as common knowledge has it, entirely mythological – that is purely fictional with as much reality as a $7 bill!

WINGED BEASTIES

One facet in particular leads me to suggest that such beasties were considered as much a part of the ancient’s menagerie as animals we today know exist. That is, dragons, Pegasus and griffins were 3-D physical flesh-and-blood organisms: for example…

*Dragons: I find it interesting that in the Chinese calendar, there are years for the rat; ox; tiger; rabbit; snake; horse; goat; monkey; rooster; dog; pig and dragon. Of all the twelve, only the dragon is considered by modern society mythical. I find it odd that the Chinese would employ eleven real beasties and one mythical one. Perhaps all dozen were real!  

If only a Chinese emperor or empress could, under pain of death for transgressors, wear an image of a dragon, it’s because their dragons weren’t fictional. Could you imagine the President of the United States being the only American allowed under the Constitution to wear a Felix-the-Cat tee-shirt and anyone else receives the death penalty for doing so? It could only take place in the context of a really real highly significant ‘animal’ that would we think be offended if just anyone of the great unwashed wore their image. Such extreme penalties are more than just a tad hard to comprehend if the ancient Chinese knew perfectly well that there weren’t such things as dragons. Translated, the ancient Chinese (and other cultures) took their dragons very seriously indeed. The fact that the serious occupation of dragon-slaying is a popular, widespread image in ancient, even historical times speaks volumes IMHO.   

Dragons could also be used in place of horses and hitched to aerial chariots. Medea (of Jason and the Argonauts fame) had an aerial dragon-drawn chariot.

And if you believe in the accuracy of the Bible then you need to accept the reality of, for example, those dragons.

Dragons were considered flesh-and-blood right through the Middle Ages; dragon-lore persists right down to our own modern era as witnessed by their popularity in video games, films and novels. 

*Griffins: I recall seeing a photograph of an ancient Greek pottery piece, vase probably, that had surrounding the circumference illustrations of various animals, animals we today instantly recognise as a representation of reality. Bulls, horses, dogs, ducks, etc. – oh, smack dab in the middle of this reality was an image of a griffin! 

Griffins dominate the images in the throne room of the palace at Knossos in Minoan Crete from roughly over 3,500 years ago. Ditto that at in the throne room at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, Mycenae in Greece. That has images of lions, deer, and of course griffins!

One tends to decorate objects like murals and pottery with familiar things, and what could be more familiar than animals. If you hark back to all those Palaeolithic cave artists, nearly all their artistic images were of animals that all and sundry can recognise and name today with very few exceptions.  So, the logic follows that if you have lots of images (and statues, etc.) of griffins, then griffins were a familiar animal and therefore no doubt really composed of flesh-and-blood.

Griffins were also well known and established in ancient Old Kingdom Egyptian lore as well, as far back as 3,300 BCE in fact. They were no stranger back in ancient Assyria and Sumer, in fact throughout the entire ancient Middle East. The popularity and reality of griffins extended right on through to and including the Middle Ages.

*Pegasus was that famous winged horse of ancient Greece. Pegasus was born out of a pregnant Gorgon, the Medusa, after her decapitation by Perseus. 

Pegasus has been depicted on a 4^th Century BCE Corinthian silver coin as well as on other antiquities such as a Parthian era bronze plate excavated in now modern day Iran. Of course Pegasus is well represented too as a stellar constellation.

Pegasus wasn’t the only flying horse, of course. The Greek sun god, Helios, had his chariot pulled across the sky daily by a team of four white winged horses. The Greek moon goddess, Selene (Luna to the Romans) was drawn through the night sky by two white horses in her chariot.

There are lots of similar illustrations of a mixing between the obviously real animal kingdom and the ‘obviously’ mythological equivalent in the various artistic, even everyday works of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, etc.

Further, there’s nothing in the ancient texts or inscriptions or images that says “Hey stupid, this is a work of fiction. I’ve imagined this all on my own. Aren’t I really something for having conceived of this?”

And that’s the crux of the question – did the ancients know that dragons, griffins and say Pegasus were as fictional as we know Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are? If so, did they just go along for the ride and the fun of it all, or did they accept their reality like we accept the existence of giraffes and the platypus? The latter is the answer.

Having, I trust, established the plausibility that griffins, dragons and Pegasus might exist, what about even more interesting, even exotic, winged beasties – of the humanoid kind.

Just as we tend to be more interested in and fascinated by extraterrestrial intelligence relative to extraterrestrial critters, and for obvious anthropological reasons associate intelligence with images of ourselves, or at least variations on that image – call it the humanoid image. One has to look no further than the depiction of intelligent aliens in the movies or on TV – nearly all have some sort of humanoid face. 

So, I’m more interested in a humanoid extraterrestrial context, which is not to suggest that dragons or griffins couldn’t really be alien but non-humanoid, rather I’m just looking for something say that’s not just alien but human or humanoid in appearance with wings, and for that one needs to further examine primarily ancient mythology. 

To be continued…

Exobiology: Ancient Astronauts: Their Pet Dragons

Exobiology: Ancient Astronauts: Their Pet Dragons

Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. Assuming one or more extraterrestrial civilizations with advanced, interstellar spaceflight capability exists; then they know about Planet Earth. If ‘guess who’s coming to dinner’ came to dinner, it’s far more probable they came to dine eons ago relative to the last several, even many, decades ago. If that’s the case, we call the diners, ‘ancient astronauts’. But if they came, perhaps they brought along their pets too, accounting for, among others, the dragon-lore of mythology.

In much the same way as British colonizers of Australia brought with them reminders of home, from plants and crops to cattle and sheep, not to mention rabbits, cats and dogs, so too did the ‘god’s’ of mythology (our ‘ancient astronauts’)  bring with them their menagerie, like say the hydra, chimera, unicorns, Pegasus, and of course dragons. This would certainly explain why nearly every pre-Christian human culture independently had dragons as part of that culture. Dragons could be good (The East), or bad (The West) but regardless ‘here be dragons’. So, I suspect that at one time, thanks to the ‘gods’, dragons were anything but mythical.

For something that doesn’t exist, and never has existed, dragons and dragon-lore has quite the remarkable hold throughout nearly all societies, from novels to films to video games; they also appear on coats-of-arms, on calendars, in art works, sculptures and as toys. Just like the mythological gods might have been really closet ET’s, well maybe dragons were ET’s pets; real flesh-and-blood creatures! Yet long after most of the extraterrestrial ‘gods’ have been totally forgotten about, dragons still rule. Maybe their ‘pets’ have truly eclipsed them!

Is there anybody from the age of four onwards on the face of the Earth who isn’t aware of the mythological creature popularly known as the dragon? The exceptions would be so relatively rare that I would have to conclude that of nearly all things make-believe, dragons are probably in the top ten recognition list. So, is that the be-all-and-end-all of things? Behind most myths, folklore or fairy tales often there is a tiny kernel of fact behind the apparent fiction. What about that kernel at the core of dragon-lore?

Now mythology-themed texts are excellent at relating various dragon tales and their associated dragon-slaying humans like Saint George, Sigurd (Siegfried), and Beowulf*; the purposes dragons served like guarding treasure and the abodes or palaces of the gods, as well as go-betweens the gods and humanity (sort of like carrier pigeons) and their having some control over the weather and the waters; and what they symbolize like evil, sin, power, military might, and pagan ways in the West and the Emperor and Empress, wisdom, immortality and other positive things like good fortune in the East.   

I find it interesting that in the Chinese calendar, there are years for the rat; ox; tiger; rabbit; snake; horse; goat; monkey; rooster; dog; pig and dragon. Of all the twelve, only the dragon is considered by modern society mythical. I find it odd that the Chinese would employ eleven real beasties and one mythical one. Perhaps all dozen were real!  

However, mythology texts hardly ever explain why dragons are universal in the past tense and beloved in the present in nearly all societies in the first place. It’s one thing to just say dragons are mythological beings; it’s quite something else to explain how that is in light of such detail that surrounds dragon-lore and their universality.

Let’s look at what a typical dragon looks like. The classic dragon of Western tradition was a four-legged winged serpent with scaly skin and sharp claws (or varying number). Chinese dragons were generally horned and bearded, with a pair of long whiskers protruding from the upper lip. Dragons were very large, averaging about 80 feet (25 metres) in length. They had the ability to fly through the air as well as move on the ground. Many dragons breathed fire although others killed with their venomous breath. There’s nothing vague about what dragons looked like and what they did which is odd seeing as how they never existed. Or did they – never exist that is?

As to that explanation:

The traditional mainstream explanation for the reason for mythological dragons does not usually rely on human nature to invent out of whole cloth life forms that don’t exist, but rather on an assumption that fossil remains of dinosaurs, etc. gave rise to speculations that, in this case, the life form we call the dragon, well those fossils kick-started those dragon mythologies all over the world. As expressed in a recent book on mythological creatures:

“The ubiquity of dragon legends around the world remains striking; few legendary creatures have a wider distribution. Some scholars have linked the stories with discoveries of dinosaur bones and it may be that in early times tales of dragons served to explain the existence of long-dead creatures of huge size. Yet no single reason can ever hope to cover all the many strands of draconian lore. More likely, gigantic winged serpents fill some archetypal need in the human imagination, crossing cultures in their power to excite awe and fear.” (Tony Allen; The Mythic Bestiary: An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Most Fantastical Creatures; Duncan Baird Publishers, London; 2008: Page 169)

Oh what a load of crap! Actually, loads of crap. Firstly, no large dinosaur bones come equipped with wings, etc. Have you ever seen a fossil or replica T-Rex that had wings and could fly?  Maybe they mean pterosaurs and/or pterodactyls, although they aren’t dinosaurs but a class of flying reptiles. However, fossils of flying reptiles aren’t very common and are in fact quite fragile.

Secondly, fossils aren’t going to tell you anything about colouration, scaly vs. smooth skin, beards and whiskers, fire-breathing abilities and venomous or otherwise bad breath, etc. Those sorts of details aren’t preserved in the fossil record, though very, very, very rarely dinosaur skin impressions are found but there are just about enough examples on hand that you can count them off on the fingers of one hand. .

Thirdly, the non-avian dinosaurs and flying reptiles died out 65 millions of years before humans and dragon mythology so there can be no contemporary firsthand knowledge of those previous long-dead dinosaur life forms to draw on. And the avian dinosaurs, which did survive – we now call them birds – hardly approach the sorts of sizes and other characteristics that could remotely be related to dragons.

Lastly, 99.9% of large fossils don’t just lie on the ground fully exposed in all their glory for the entire world to see. Most bits are usually buried and mainly in a somewhat jumbled state due to the various geological, hydrological and meteorological forces acting on the bones at the time of the animal’s death and the millions of years thereafter. It takes experts to piece things back together again as two of more animal fossils might be intermixed.

Further, why would the uneducated great unwashed living back before those golden years when mythological dragons ruled the skies go to all the trouble of the backbreaking sort of work it takes to fully expose a large fossil in the first place, and thus invent the mythological dragon? I mean it wouldn’t put any food on the table!

So when all else fails, put our invention of mythological and universal dragons down to some variation of nebulous Freudian psychology mumbo-jumbo. Give me a break! No, the answer is that dragons were really real and humans actually observed them. There is a single reason after all.

Now the bigger mystery here is why the cultural difference between East and West in the popular perception of dragons, although that’s not as clear cut as some texts make it out to be. For example, China too had bad dragons – evil black dragons that were credited with inciting storms and floods – and a dragon slayer (Lu Dongbin). Japan had an evil dragon too called Yamata-no-Orochi, slain* by the often troublesome Japanese trickster god Susanowo.

Exceptions to the rule aside, I suggest that the relative differences in the portrayals of dragons reflect back on the nature of their masters – the gods.

The Eastern gods appear to me to be a lot less dysfunctional and all around nicer deities than the Western gods. The Greeks and Norse people may have worshiped Zeus et al. and Odin et al. but you really wouldn’t want them to serve as role models for your kids. 

There is however another, and perhaps even more logical explanation for the differences between Western and Eastern dragons. Dragons are bad in the (Christian) west because the Christian churches decrees it so. Dragons represent the old ways, the old gods, maybe even the devil incarnate. In the non-Christian (Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) east, dragons have no such baggage or stigma attached.

The extraterrestrials ‘gods’ and their dragon pets share something in common. The dragons, much like their masters, the ‘gods’ are as close to immortal as makes no odds. I think it’s safe to say ‘immortal’ in this context isn’t really forever and ever, amen, but rather a damn long time, which, as far as primitive humans were concerned translated as, for all practical purposes, ‘immortal’.  

The bottom line in all this is that the gods are really extraterrestrials; their pets, the dragons are also aliens; part of the god’s bestiary. When the gods left the building (Planet Earth), they took their dragons with them as well as the rest of their so-called ‘mythological’ menagerie. 

*As an aside, the actual slaying of dragons is problematically against such events. If as described (see above) you’d no more go up against a dragon armed only with a sword as you would a T-Rex. You’d want at least an army tank under or at your command or an army of swordsmen at the least (and expect lots of casualties too). Then too, the gods might not permit the slaying of their pets. Of course the Christian church would encourage tall tales of dragon slaying since the dragon was pagan and may even be symbolic of Satan. But if dragons were slain, where are all the mounted and stuffed dragon head trophies that should be on display in all manner of ways and places? 

Telling tales of slaying dragons is akin, IMHO, to a fisherman’s tall tales – the six inch fish that got away, after a few drinks at the pub, turns out to be a six foot monster fish! But if dragons were really slain, where are all the mounted and stuffed dragon head trophies that should be on display in all manner of ways and places? Lack of such stuffed trophies doesn’t prove dragons didn’t exist (there are no taxidermic head trophies of sabre-toothed cats either on display), rather that mortals didn’t dare go up against them!

Further reading:

Hargreaves, Joyce; A Little History of Dragons; Walker & Company, New York; 2009:

Mythology Interlude: Why Dragons?

When it comes to mythology, my basic premise is that anytime you have near universal themes between wildly dispersed in space and/or time cultures, ethnic groups, nationalities, whatever, then you sit up and take notice that something more than just human imagination is at work. Take dragons for instance.

For something that doesn’t exist, and never has existed, dragons and dragon-lore has quite the remarkable hold throughout nearly all societies, from novels to films to video games; they also appear on coats-of-arms, on calendars, in art works, sculptures, depicted on the prows of Viking longboats, incorporated into ancient jewellery, and as toys. Dragons appear as corporate logos and as part of the names of companies, not to mention sports teams. Just like the mythological gods might have been really closet ET’s, well maybe dragons were ET’s pets; real flesh-and-blood creatures! Yet long after most of the extraterrestrial ‘gods’ have been totally forgotten about, dragons still rule. Maybe their ‘pets’ have truly eclipsed them!

I noted several posts ago that our boldly going extraterrestrials decided to stop and rest there boots on terra firma once upon a time a long time ago:

*In much the same way as British colonizers of Australia brought with them reminders of home, from plants and crops to cattle and sheep, not to mention rabbits, cats and dogs, so to did the ‘god’s bring with them their menagerie, like say the hydra, chimera, unicorns, Pegasus, and of course dragons.

*This would certainly explain why nearly every pre-Christian human culture independently had dragons as part of that culture. Dragons could be good (The East), or bad (The West) but regardless ‘here be dragons’. So, I suspect that at one time, thanks to the ‘gods’, dragons were anything but mythical.

Continuing on from there…

*Is there anybody from the age of four onwards on the face of the Earth who isn’t aware of the mythological creature popularly known as the dragon? The exceptions would be so relatively rare that I would have to conclude that of nearly all things make-believe, dragons are probably in the top ten recognition list. So, is that the be-all-and-end-all of things? Behind most myths, folklore or fairy tales often there is a tiny kernel of fact behind the apparent fiction. What about that kernel at the core of dragon-lore?

*I note for starters that dragons are apparent from the get-go. Images of dragons are frequently found on cylinder seals from the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia and surrounding regions – the cradle of civilization. 

*Now mythology-themed texts are excellent at relating various dragon tales and their associated dragon-slaying humans like Saint George, Sigurd (Siegfried), and Beowulf*; what purposes dragons served like guarding treasure and the abodes or palaces of the gods, as well as go-betweens the gods and humanity (sort of like carrier pigeons) and their having some control over the weather and the waters; and what they symbolize like evil, sin, power, military might, and pagan ways in the West and the Emperor and Empress, wisdom, immortality and other positive things like good fortune in the East. Dragons were even known do be among those beasties that pulled the aerial ‘chariots’ of the ‘gods’.   

*However, mythology texts hardly ever explain why dragons are universally past and beloved in the present in nearly all societies in the first place. It’s one thing to just say dragons are mythological beings; it’s quite something else to explain how that is in light of such detail that surrounds dragon-lore and their universality.

*Let’s look at what a typical dragon looks like. The classic dragon of Western tradition was a four-legged winged serpent with scaly skin and sharp claws (or varying number). Chinese dragons were generally horned and bearded, with a pair of long whiskers protruding from the upper lip. Dragons were very large, averaging about 80 feet (25 metres) in length. They had the ability to fly through the air as well as move on the ground. Many dragons breathed fire although others killed with their venomous breath.

Actually, the fire-breathing bit was probably an embellishment – maybe more a reflection on bad breath or water vapour visible upon exhaling. Just like most of mythology is 5% truth and 95% fisherman’s embellishment – the story gets better with each reincarnation! However, in general there’s nothing vague about what dragons looked like and what they did which is odd seeing as how they never existed. Or did they – never exist that is?

As to that explanation:

*The traditional mainstream explanation for the reason for mythological dragons does not usually rely on human nature to invent out of whole cloth life forms that don’t exist, but rather on an assumption that fossil remains of dinosaurs, etc. gave rise to speculations that, in this case, the life form we call the dragon, well those fossils kick-started those dragon mythologies all over the world. As expressed in a recent book on mythological creatures:

*“The ubiquity of dragon legends around the world remains striking; few legendary creatures have a wider distribution. Some scholars have linked the stories with discoveries of dinosaur bones and it may be that in early times tales of dragons served to explain the existence of long-dead creatures of huge size. Yet no single reason can ever hope to cover all the many strands of draconian lore. More likely, gigantic winged serpents fill some archetypal need in the human imagination, crossing cultures in their power to excite awe and fear.” (Tony Allen; The Mythic Bestiary: An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Most Fantastical Creatures; Duncan Baird Publishers, London; 2008: Page 169)

*Oh what a load of crap! Actually, loads of crap. Firstly, no large dinosaur bones come equipped with wings, etc. Have you ever seen a fossil or replica T-Rex that had wings and could fly?  Maybe they mean pterosaurs and/or pterodactyls, although they aren’t dinosaurs but a class of flying reptiles. However, fossils of flying reptiles aren’t very common and are in fact quite fragile.

*Secondly, fossils aren’t going to tell you anything about colouration, scaly vs. smooth skin, beards and whiskers, fire-breathing abilities and venomous or otherwise bad breath, etc. Those sorts of details aren’t preserved in the fossil record, though very, very, very rarely dinosaur skin impressions are found but there are just about enough examples on hand that you can count them off on the fingers of one hand. .

*Thirdly, the non-avian dinosaurs and flying reptiles died out 65 millions of years before humans and dragon mythology so there can be no contemporary firsthand knowledge of those previous long-dead dinosaur life forms to draw on. And the avian dinosaurs, which did survive – we now call them birds – hardly approach the sorts of sizes and other characteristics that could remotely be related to dragons.

*Lastly, 99.9% of large fossils don’t just lie on the ground fully exposed in all their glory for the entire world to see. Most bits are usually buried and mainly in a somewhat jumbled state due to the various geological, hydrological and meteorological forces acting on the bones at the time of the animal’s death and the millions of years thereafter. It takes experts to piece things back together again as two of more animal fossils might be intermixed.

*Further, why would the uneducated great unwashed living back before those golden years when mythological dragons ruled the skies go to all the trouble of the backbreaking sort of work it takes to fully expose a large fossil in the first place, and thus invent the mythological dragon? I mean it wouldn’t put any food on the table!

*So when all else fails, put our invention of mythological and universal dragons down to some variation of nebulous Freudian psychology mumbo-jumbo. Give me a break! No, the answer is that dragons were really real and humans actually observed them. There is a single reason after all.

*Now just consider, how many extinct animals did we mythologically invent prior to the discovery of their fossils? Dinosaurs weren’t all the rage before their fossil bones were uncovered and realised for what they were. Why didn’t we mentally create them before the fact? Why didn’t we have mythological trilobites in our legends 7000 years ago? We just didn’t have dinosaurs, trilobites, mythological or otherwise, before their fossils were discovered.

*Why didn’t we have in our various mythologies any one of thousands of strange, now extinct, organisms? Maybe the answer is because we are NOT prone to invent fictional beasties. If strange beasts are part and parcel of our mythology, maybe it’s because those strange beasts really existed at some point in time that coincided with human existence.

*On the other hand, you might wonder why there are no profound mythologies about now extinct mammoths or sabre-toothed cats, even though they coexisted for a short time with ‘modern’ man. Why not? They were pretty big and fearsome; maybe not quite in the big leagues of dragons, but big enough. Perhaps that might be because these beasties had no connection with the ‘gods’ – they weren’t alien beasties.

*Now the bigger mystery here is why the cultural difference between East and West in the popular perception of dragons, although that’s not as clear cut as some texts make it out to be. For example, China too had bad dragons – evil black dragons that were credited with inciting storms and floods – and a dragon slayer (Lu Dongbin). Japan had an evil dragon too called Yamata-no-Orochi, slain** by the often troublesome Japanese trickster god Susanowo. There’s a somewhat parallel tale in ancient Babylon and Assyria between the god Marduk and the ‘dragon’ Tiamat. That a god might slay a dragon, well, I guess if you can have wild dos and feral cats, you can have rogue dragons! Maybe only ‘gods’ are allowed, or have the ability, to slay dragons.

*Exceptions to the rule aside, I suggest that the relative differences in the portrayals of dragons reflect back on the nature of their masters – the gods.

*The Eastern gods appear to me to be a lot less dysfunctional and all around nicer deities than the Western gods. The Greeks and Norse people may have worshiped Zeus et al. and Odin et al. but you really wouldn’t want them to serve as role models for your kids. 

*There is however another, and perhaps even more logical explanation for the differences between Western and Eastern dragons. Dragons are bad in the (Christian) west because the Christian churches decrees it so. Dragons represent the old ways, the old gods, maybe even the devil incarnate. In the non-Christian (Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) east, dragons have no such baggage or stigma attached.

*The extraterrestrials ‘gods’ and their dragon pets share something in common. The dragons, much like their masters, the ‘gods’ are as close to immortal as makes no odds. I think it’s safe to say ‘immortal’ in this context isn’t really forever and ever, amen, but rather a damn long time, which, as far as primitive humans were concerned translated as, for all practical purposes, ‘immortal’.  

*The bottom line in all this is that the gods are really extraterrestrials; their pets, the dragons are also aliens; part of the god’s bestiary. When the gods left the building (Planet Earth), they took their dragons with them as well as the rest of their so-called ‘mythological’ menagerie. 

**As an aside, the actual slaying of dragons is problematically against such events. If as described (see above) you’d no more go up against a dragon armed only with a sword as you would a T-Rex. You’d want at least an army tank under or at your command or an army of swordsmen at the least (and expect lots of casualties too). Then too, the gods might not permit the slaying of their pets. Of course the Christian church would encourage tall tales of dragon slaying since the dragon was pagan and may even be symbolic of Satan.

**Telling tales of slaying dragons is akin, IMHO, to a fisherman’s tall tales – the six inch fish that got away, after a few drinks at the pub, turns out to be a six foot monster fish! But if dragons were really slain, where are all the mounted and stuffed dragon head trophies that should be on display in all manner of ways and places? Lack of such stuffed trophies doesn’t prove dragons didn’t exist (there are no taxidermic head trophies of sabre-toothed cats either on display), rather that mortals didn’t dare go up against them!