Thread: Did man walk with the dinosaurs?

Originally Posted by The Enterer

I'm not sure I buy that completely. I don't really 'see' a snake when I look at most depictions of dragons. And Why would the giant lizard be such a constant? Why not giant rats or giant frogs?

Humans all over the world have had a fear/worship relationship with snakes throughout history, and many people have a fear of snakes written deeply in their genes, to the extent that any snake they encounter literally appears monstrous and huge. It's only natural that, in depicting this fear, we conflate serpent features with other natural enemies--lions, bats, wolves--and connect them to any related creature we encounter, like monitor lizards or dinosaur bones, but snakes remain the creatures with perhaps the single strongest hold on our imagination. For the agricultural societies in which dragon myths arose, where most people worked in the fields, this had to be doubly true.

Our modern depictions tend to be lion bodies with crocodile legs and serpent necks, and more creatures of the air than the earth and water, which divorces them in our minds from their origins, but they still bear little resemblance to a T-rex or Pterodactyl.

Originally Posted by The Cusp

I had heard something about a 150 million year old cave painting that depicted a T-Rex, so I did a search to try to find out more about it, and came across the most fascinating site. It's well worth the read no matter where you stand on evolution.

The Flinstones are also proof positive of that.

Originally Posted by iseeu

The Flinstones are also proof positive of that.

Dude, universal mind already made that pointm and he did a far better job of it than you i might add!

That wasn't the point of this thread. It was a good read and had some interesting information, like the conditions on earth in the dinosaur era and how they might have contributed to things growing larger. The "Sonic Bloom" growing technique developed from studying those conditions is just amazing, and I can't help but wonder what that would do to a pot garden.

But as usual, we can't get away from a basic schoolyard mentality. I really should have known better to start a thread like this, but it's fun every now and then just to how people react.