The Truth About Dragons
You probably know a story, maybe even one of your own, which gets bigger every time it’s told. The fish your uncle almost caught as a boy gets bigger every time you hear the story. The number of goals your cousin kicked last season seems to grow every week. Even the size of the pumpkin your father grew that magical summer is fast approaching the size of a small car.
Now, if you multiply this by 100,000, you might understand what happened to dragons. The truth is that although the myths and legends about dragons are correct in almost every detail, their size is completely wrong.
Dragons are quite real, but on average they are approximately the same size as a bee. In fact, dragons have an awful lot in common with bees, as you will soon discover.
How the story-makers of old got the size so disproptionately wrong we can only speculate. The small group of people who know the truth, however, agree that it probably resulted from the omission of scale bars.*
This theory suggests that the drawings of dragons generally found on cave walls or in ancient manuscripts did not show their actual size. By the time dragons had passed into myth and legend, the people looking at those original pictures confused the dragons with dinosaurs.
This is the story of how dragons were rediscovered, about the boy who discovered them, and the secrets the legends didn’t tell.
* Scale bar: A line drawn on or near a picture with a label showing the actual length of the bar. Sometimes an object, such as a banana, is used instead of a scale bar, hence the term ‘banana for scale’.
Now, if you multiply this by 100,000, you might understand what happened to dragons. The truth is that although the myths and legends about dragons are correct in almost every detail, their size is completely wrong.
Dragons are quite real, but on average they are approximately the same size as a bee. In fact, dragons have an awful lot in common with bees, as you will soon discover.
How the story-makers of old got the size so disproptionately wrong we can only speculate. The small group of people who know the truth, however, agree that it probably resulted from the omission of scale bars.*
This theory suggests that the drawings of dragons generally found on cave walls or in ancient manuscripts did not show their actual size. By the time dragons had passed into myth and legend, the people looking at those original pictures confused the dragons with dinosaurs.
This is the story of how dragons were rediscovered, about the boy who discovered them, and the secrets the legends didn’t tell.
* Scale bar: A line drawn on or near a picture with a label showing the actual length of the bar. Sometimes an object, such as a banana, is used instead of a scale bar, hence the term ‘banana for scale’.
Dragon without banana for scale
Dragon with banana for scale