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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CH712:

Legends about dragons are really actual accounts of man meeting up with dinosaurs.

Source:

Taylor, Paul S., 1998. The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible. http://www.christiananswers.net/dinosaurs/j-dragon1.html

Response:

  1. Folklore does not require a physical basis. Leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster, djinni, the tooth fairy, and other creatures have long survived in folklore without any bodies to examine.

  2. Men never met up with living dinosaurs.

  3. Dinosaurs need not be living to inspire myth and legend. In China, fossil bones (of all kinds of creatures, not just dinosaurs) have long been called dragon bones. Fossils of Protoceratops inspired legends of griffins (Mayor 2000). In Lakota myth, dinosaur fossils in the Badlands of South Dakota are attributed to river monsters (Erdoes and Ortiz 1984, 220-222). The Pawnee attribute fossils to a former race of giants (Grinnell 1961, 355-356).

References:

  1. Erdoes, Richard and Alfonso Ortiz, 1984. American Indian Myths and Legends, New York: Pantheon Books.
  2. Grinnell, George Bird, 1961. Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; reprinted from Forest and Stream Publishing Company, New York, 1889.
  3. Mayor, Adrienne, 2000. The First Fossil Hunters, Princeton University Press.

Further Reading:

Jones, David E., 2000. An Instinct for Dragons. New York: Routledge.
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created 2003-9-24