by MarkgaB5 wrote:How do we know theyre mythical?
You think a giant winged reptile wouldn't leave behind it persistent remains, in the form of a bloody huge skeleton? One that moreover, if these legends bore any connection to reality, would be reliably datable to recent times? After all, skeletons of large ancient reptiles have repeatedly proven to be sufficiently persistent to last long enough for palaeontologists to dig them up, and for that matter, skeletons of organisms pre-dating reptiles have also proven to be thus persistent.
Plus, if any such giant reptiles had actually existed, I suspect quite a few civilisations would have set about trying to capture one, and document the relevant event. Civilisations that developed writing systems, such as the ancient Chinese, ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians or Greeks, would have been very strongly motivated to do this. Preservation of the remains of such an organism would likely have been a priority too, not least because Aristotle, one of the foremost students of the biosphere in the era of Classical Antiquity, spent decades dissecting and studying just about anything he could lay his hands on, and a giant flying reptile would have been a "must have" specimen for his attentions. Oddly enough, both the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks left behind a body of writing devoted to the Nile Crocodile, a 25 foot long reptile that can be observed in action today, the Greeks additionally noting that the Egyptians had a city devoted to religious worship of a crocodile god, a city the Greeks referred to as "Crocodilopolis" in their writings.
It's one of the reasons I can safely dismiss fatuous creationist assertions that non-avian dinosaurs and humans coexisted around 4,000 BCE. Because quite a few civilisations would have been only too eager to report the appearance of a honking great 50 ton Sauropod dinosaur turning up and munching on their crops, or a full sized Tyrannosaurus rex making a meal of several of the villagers. The fact that none of the ancient civilisations provided reports of this sort, along with the complete absence of remains that are reliably datable to recent age for any of these organisms, should be telling you something important here.
