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I believe everyone has this question, our Chinese zodiac signs can see the prototype in reality, except for the dragon, is it possible that the dragon really exists?
Paleontologists now believe that the appearance of the dragon may not have been imagined by Chinese ancestors, but may have been inspired by a kind of paleontological incarnation.
In other words, the dragon may have a prototype, and the imagination of our ancients suggests that the image of the dragon appeared in China at least 6,000 years ago and plays an important role in religious theology.
For us Chinese, the dragon is benevolent, and it symbolizes divine power.
It is said that the clouds in the sky are formed by the breath of a dragon, which controls rain, wind, rivers, oceans, and all other bodies of water.
There are similar legends about dragons even in other parts of East Asia, so the question is how the ancients constructed the image of the dragon.
Wang Fu of the Han Dynasty wrote that every element of the dragon's form may have come from other animals, such as camels, oxen, deer, snakes, tigers, ospreys, and so on.
Other scholars believe that each feature on the dragon's body represents the totems of the major tribes of ancient China. After these tribes merged, the image of the dragon appeared.
But some paleontologists believe that fossil bones from animals may have influenced the origin of Chinese dragons, and a document dating back to the 4th century of China's Jin dynasty mentions that many dragon bones were found in what is now Sichuan Province.
Then we now know that many of the sediments in the area date back to the middle and late Jurassic.
These maps are rich in fossilized creatures such as carnivorous sauropods, stegosaurus, and giant horned dinosaurs.
With these in mind, paleontologists have suggested that as early as the 4th century, we found the so-called dragon bones, which may be dinosaur fossils.
According to this discovery, the ancient Chinese used their imagination in the long history to slowly construct the image of the dragon, which really gave it an incredible mythological story.
Not only Chinese dragons, but now paleontologists believe that fossil remains may have influenced cultural and artistic creations in various places around the world.
For example, there is also a mythical monster that may also have originated from paleontological fossils, and he is the cyclops.
Since the famous Greek poet Ossey Hud wrote about three blacksmiths in his Theocracy, these three brothers were sons of God, and each was born with only one eye in the middle of their forehead.
They are known for their metalworking technology and great strength. It is said that they helped Zeus create thunder and lightning, Poseidon the trident, and Hades created the stealth helmet, so the cyclops is a character from Greek mythology.
However, in 1914, the Austrian biologist Abel suggested that the legend of the cyclops may have originated from a dwarf elephant fossil, specifically the skull of this creature.
The living elephants belong to this proboscis order as well as their extinct counterparts. The skulls of these creatures had large nostrils on their foreheads, so paleontologists suspect that ancient explorers may have mistaken these massive nostrils for giant eye sockets.
Although wild proboscis animals have been extinct in Europe for about 10,000 years, these proboscis have nearly 20 million years of evolutionary history in Europe, including large creatures such as dinosaurs and alligator-toothed elephants, whose skulls resemble the skulls of mythical giants.
And, of course, the European dwarf elephants, which are miniature versions of the extinct saber-toothed species that live on the island of Cyprus. There are also small pygmy elephants, less than 2 meters tall at the shoulder, who live in Crete, Sicily and other islands in the Mediterranean.
Later, the ancient Greeks discovered dwarf elephant fossils on islands in the Mediterranean. Since they had never seen an elephant before and had not studied the skeletal structure of a proboscis deer, the nasal opening in the middle of the dwarf elephant skull was mistaken for an eye socket. So they created the mythical Cyclops.
In addition to this there is the creature called the griffin, which has the body of a lion, the head and wings of an eagle.
From Europe to Asia, the griffin is thousands of years old, and its image often appears in decorative arts and texts.
However, unlike other mythological complex monsters, this creature has no supernatural powers, and is not associated with any gods or heroes, but has always been regarded as a living creature in reality.
It is said to guard hidden treasures in the Gobi Desert and prey on other animals and humans.
In 1993, a scholar at Stanford University suggested that the origin of the myth about the griffin may be related to the remains of the protoceratosaurus.
Protoceratosaurus, which lived in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia during the late Cretaceous period about 75 million years ago, was a quadruped animal that, like the griffin, had a large, curved beak and triangular bumps on either side of its face, which could be mistaken for mammalian ears.
Based on its skeleton, it may seem that there was once a large, half-bird, half-mammalian creature roaming the Gobi Desert.
About 30 years ago, the people who lived here began to search for gold in the western part of the desert. They must have found the remains of Protoceratosaurus, the nest as well as dinosaur eggs.
The ancient Greeks began trading with such people sometime in the 7th century BC. When cultures collided, Greek travelers heard the story of a creature with wings, a beak, and the body of a lion.
This creature guards the gold mines in the desert. But whether or not these fossils inspired the imagination of the ancestors is now uncertain, because of the lack of evidence.
These myths and works of art often have very complex origins and various sources of inspiration. So usually, we can only speculate about whether paleontological fossils influenced the origin of mythical monsters?
I am the mystery of the universe, follow me and take you to see different events.