....In 58 B.C., Pliny reported, the "spine of the sea serpent killed by Perseus at Joppa" (modern-day Jaffa) was displayed in Rome. Karl Shuker, author of "Dragons, A Natural History" (Simon & Schuster, 1995), surmises that the monster Cetus, swimming up to eat Andromeda, might have grown out of rare sightings of oarfish, a snakelike fish up to 30 feet long with a coral red head crest. Other scholars theorize that the skeleton might have been one of the sperm whales that once commonly beached near Jaffa. A half-rotted whale, with its jawbones and vestigial leg bones exposed, would look rather dragonlike, they say.

....But there is another obvious source for the dragon myth: the bones of dinosaurs and extinct mammals. Bones exposed by storms, earthquakes or digging were well known to the ancients, said Dr. Adrienne Mayor, a professor of folklore at Princeton and the author of "The First Fossil Hunters" (Princeton, 2000). She argues that the myth of gold-guarding griffins arose in the red clay of the Gobi Desert, a landscape literally scattered with white Protoceratops skulls, with parrot beaks and bony neck frills.

Othenio Abel, an Austrian paleontologist, speculated as early as 1914 that the central nasal holes in skulls of prehistoric dwarf elephants were the source for Homer's Cyclops. Abel added that the skulls of cave bears - ursus spelaeus, half again as big as grizzlies - could have given rise to tales of dragons.

....The head of a dragon sculptured in 1590 by Ulrich Vogelsang for the city of Klagenfurt, Austria, was modeled on a "dragon skull" found by quarrymen in 1335. It is now known to be that of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.

Paleontologists can even account for the legend that dragons have jewels in their foreheads. Big calcite crystals form on long-buried skulls. Uniting these theories would give us a primordial fear in our monkey brains of snakes, big cats and raptors snatching us from our trees, which in turn would predispose us to interpret fossils and bones of unknown creatures as dragons, which is reinforced by classical literature and even the Bible. I would add, going even farther back into the atavistic recesses of our beings, maybe our reptile brains recognize themselves in dragons and thus feel an affinity. Or maybe not ("come along, take my hand, let's all go to dragon laaaand")