In 1335 a skull was found near Klagenfurt, Austria, and people thought it came from a two-legged flying dragon they called a lindwurm. Today the skull is known to be from a woolly rhinoceros about 50,000 years old; the dragon fountain in Klagenfurt was built in 1583 from one solid piece of slate from a nearby mountain. The dragon and tower came to symbolize the city, and the fountain still stands in the town square. Long ago, people found giant fossil bones and made up stories to explain them. Ancient Greeks and Romans collected fossil bones, and people who did not know about extinction thought huge fossils might belong to dragons. An elephant skull has one big hole in the middle where the trunk was. On a skull it looks like a single eye, so Greeks who found dwarf elephant skulls on islands like Sicily may have imagined one-eyed giants.
The narwhal's long spiral horn is really a tooth. A narwhal has two teeth in its upper jaw. In males the left tooth usually grows forward through the front of the jaw at about two or three years old, becoming a spiral tusk that can reach 9.8 feet long and weigh over 20 pounds. A narwhal's tusk is not solid bone; it is full of nerves and can sense changes in the water, such as salt and temperature. Vikings likely began finding narwhal tusks washed up in places like Greenland. Buyers in Europe took them for unicorn horns, and the price grew to ten times their weight in gold or more. Queen Elizabeth I was said to own a unicorn horn worth 10,000 pounds, the price of a castle. Kings and queens drank from cups made of unicorn horn because they believed it was protective, but the horn was really narwhal tusk.
The Greek writer Ctesias, about 400 BCE, wrote of wild asses in India as big as horses, and Pliny later described a one-horned animal with an elephant's feet and a boar's tail. Different writers gave the unicorn different bodies; the Unicorn Tapestries, a famous set of medieval wall hangings of a unicorn hunt, are now in the Met Cloisters in New York. Writers said unicorns were real well into the Middle Ages; the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland. The royal arms of the United Kingdom still show a lion and a unicorn. Scottish royal unicorns are often shown wrapped in chains, and one writer says the unicorn was about the strength of the Scottish monarch more than magic.
A griffin is a made-up animal with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek myth, was a favorite picture on Greek pottery and coins. Corinthian pots showed him from the 7th century BCE, and Corinth put him on coins from the 6th century BCE. In Greek myth a centaur was half man and half horse, with a human head, arms and chest joined to a horse's body. Centaurs lived in the forests of Thessaly, and the centaur Chiron was known for great wisdom. In Greek myth the Minotaur had a man's body and a bull's head. King Minos had the builder Daedalus make a maze called the Labyrinth for it, and the hero Theseus found his way out with a ball of thread.
Long ago, sailors told of mermaids, but they were most likely seeing manatees. The average adult manatee is about 10 feet long and weighs 800 to 1,200 pounds. Manatees and their relatives, the sirenians, are the only completely aquatic mammals that eat only plants. Christopher Columbus wrote in 1493 that he saw three mermaids and said they were not as beautiful as people said; today many scientists think they were manatees, which have fingerlike bones in their flippers and can turn their heads. The U.S. ocean agency NOAA says no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. In Greek art, sirens were birds with a woman's head, as in Homer's Odyssey, and later pictures often mixed them up with mermaids.
The kraken, a sea monster of old tales, may have been inspired by a real animal, the giant squid. As of November 2026, the largest giant squid ever found measured 59 feet long and weighed nearly a ton, yet people first got images of a live one only in 2004, when researchers in Japan took them. Giant squid live 200 to 1,400 metres below the surface, hunt fish and crustaceans, and also scavenge. They cannot get enough oxygen near the surface, so people rarely meet one alive. Old maps from about 500 years ago show sea serpents and mermaids, which were drawn because many people thought such beings were real. Sea serpent stories are very old, and the giant oarfish may be one real animal behind them.
Old animal books mixed real and imagined creatures. Bestiary writers said a whale was so big it could rest on the sea until plants grew on its back. They also described animals their readers knew, such as cats, donkeys and owls, so true and untrue facts sat side by side. A medieval book of beasts called the dragon a kind of serpent, larger than all other animals, living in caves with a strong tail; it said not even the elephant was safe: the dragon waits and suffocates it in its coils. Medieval bestiaries grew from an older Greek book on animals called the Physiologus, and later writers added more to it; the one surviving Beowulf manuscript was made around the year 1000. It holds a poem of over 3,000 lines in three parts, the last about a dragon guarding treasure, and was damaged by fire in 1731.
Nobody knows who first invented the dragon. Carved jade dragons from China's Hongshan culture are 4,500 to 3,000 BCE, though some historians link the idea to rainbows; the oldest Chinese dragons are more than 3,000 years old. In China, people often believed any nearby spring or river was a dragon's home, and over 40 Chinese rivers have the word dragon in their name. Dragons were not always scary: in some stories they bring rain and good luck, and in Chinese stories they guarded waterways, mountains or skies. Historian Adrienne Mayor says people long ago explained strange creatures from the evidence they had; some monsters were possibly inspired by real animals that people could not yet explain. The Chinese words for dinosaur still join the words for terror and dragon.
The dragon on the Welsh flag has a long history. A dragon standard was used by Roman soldiers, who likely borrowed it from the Dacians. Welsh kings later took it up, and in 1485 Henry Tudor flew a red dragon on white and green. A Welsh legend from the 12th century tells of King Vortigern, whose castle kept falling down; a boy said two sleeping dragons lay under the hill. They woke and fought: the red dragon won. Babylon's Ishtar Gate, built about 575 BCE, was decorated with rows of aurochs and dragons called mushhushshu in glazed brick. German archaeologists dug it up in 1902-1914 and it was rebuilt in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.
The English word dragon comes from the Greek word drakon, which meant a serpent. A small lizard called Draco, the flying dragon, spreads skin wings and glides from tree to tree, and flying dragon lizards live in rain forests in Southeast Asia and southern India. They are only about 8 inches (20 cm) long with the tail, and they use their tails to steer while gliding. Draco lizards have a set of long ribs they can extend and retract, with folds of skin between the ribs; the folds lie flat against the body at rest and open like wings for gliding. Draco flying dragons live on ants and termites, and the males are very territorial.
Komodo dragons are real animals, the largest lizards alive in the world today. Male Komodo dragons can grow about 10 feet long, and they eat almost any meat, from small rodents to large water buffalo. As of November 2026, the largest verified Komodo dragon was 10.3 feet long. Scientists from the West did not find Komodo dragons until the early 1900s. As of November 2026, San Diego Zoo reports that Komodo dragon numbers fell from 5,000 to 3,500 between 1981 and 2021, a 30 percent drop in 40 years. It also says habitat loss leaves little breeding between groups on different islands.
Words to know
- lindwurm: German dragon
- fossil: ancient remains
- bestiary: old animal book
- aquatic: living in water
- territorial: defending its area
