Please Help Me Disprove This (Re: Modern dinosaurs)

And you find that they don't have "very similar stories", but you do find, with a little reflection, that the English language has but one common term for mythical quasi-reptillian beasts. No, first you have to wonder whether this is the case.It is not.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Fair enough. The first is a Chinese lung dragon, the second is a woodcutting of St. George slaying the dragon, and the third is a Great Wyrm Red Dragon, from the Monster Manual.

...are you a D+D nerd?

You bet your d20.

considering how many d20's i have, and how cheaply they are acquired, that would have been a safe bet. i am not a D+D nerd, but many years ago i played m:tg and they were useful for life-counters, among other things. my father, however, was a huge D+D nerd in college. so he's got a bunch of first editions. but think of dragons like more like this:

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Ha ha! The Great Red Beatstick. My wife has one or two of those in one of her red decks, I think. I was always more of a blue/black guy, myself. Then they made the game look like Pokemon in 8th edition and I couldn't bring myself to play it anymore.Gawd I spent way too much money on those stupid cards.

i had one in a green deck. without any mountains in it. figure that one out. the red deck i used was a pretty classic burn deck. i was never any good with building blue-anything decks.and how did you find one of those oh-so-rare she-geeks to marry? lol. yeah. what an ugly makeover that was. the art, in most instances, kept getting better, but the card design was ugly and not even as clearly understood as the older ones. that's about when i quit, too. didn't we all. and they're worthless today, too. my little brother started playing with some of the newer series recently, so i dusted off my cards and played him a bit. and the thought occured to me, "why not build some of those decks that were too expensive when i was younger?" i checked prices on ebay -- and stuff i couldn't find before was like a dollar or two a card for good rares.heh, maybe we should start an "insanely geeky hobbies" thread or something.

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There's no question that dragon myths in China owe quite a bit to dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. But the connection has nothing to do with human beings and dinosaurs living as contemporaries. It just attests to the fact that people in pre-scientific centuries, like people today, could come across fossils.For centuries before science existed, fossils were being found. And people then knew as well as anyone today that where bones exist, there was once a creature.Most dragon legends, you'll note, have the critters living in caves. You're digging in a quarry or a mine and find skulls and a rib cage or some footprints of a creature larger than any beast you have ever seen, it impresses you. Digging out all of the bones would probably be impractical, but you would chip off some bits to show it around. And you will describe the creatures to others.The idea of extinction was not foremost in the discoverers' minds. Neither was the idea that the remains could be as ancient as we now know them to be. They generally figured that if they saw bones of creatures in a locale, that these were the remains of individuals who had living relatives elsewhere in that locale. If one found spectacularly large bones in caves, it followed that spectacularly large creatures would be found still living in other caves. Word got around. If one was exploring in a cave and heard breathing sounds or saw smoke, it was best to get out. Off in the darkness, one of these creatures was surely alive and producing these effects.It was well known that giant creatures inhabited, in addition to quarries and mines, the vast expanses of the Gobi desert. Anyone familiar with the place knew their bones could be found there.Folklore had it that 'dragon bones' possessed healing properties. There was money to be made in buying and selling dragon bones. Healers knew that many of the dragon bones offered for sale were fakes. (A long tradition stands behind the Protoavis incident!) But if healers knew where to look, they could find dragon bones themselves.Asian paleontologists in the first half of the twentieth century knew to ask locals about good 'dragon bone' sources when they wanted to do some fossil hunting. The discoverers of Peking Man (Homo habilus) found the fossils in an area long known by locals as an excellent source of dragon bones.If you look at the traditional pictures of dragons that have taken shape in Asian art, you see birdlike legs and feet but otherwise generally reptilian features. The head shape may suggest a mammal with a snout, though, and the teeth are often flat (like those of a herbivore). And tradition places the animal in a cave or some other underground region. None of this is the kind of picture that would emerge, even in a pre-scientific age, if people saw a living iquanodont or giant ground sloth wandering in the open. It's the kind of picture that would emerge when people assemble a variety of impressions from a hodgepodge of unsorted fossil remains.___________Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.Edited by Archer Opterix, : brev.Edited by Archer Opterix, : repair.

At a game of Dungeons and Dragons, I shit you not. Why not? I've got like 7 or 8.

And I thought I was a geek...Seriously, I have a friend that met his wife at a backpacking trip. I have a friend that met his wife at a party. I have a friend that met his wife while on vacation. I even have a friend that met his wife online. But at a game? What is the world coming to?Anyway, you don't know how long I was racking my brain trying to figure out what this DD thing you guys were talking about before you finally said "Dungeons and Dragons".

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

qs(though dinosaurs are not reptiles, as is commonly misunderstood.)[/qs] what is the current classification of dinosaurs and from what reference does one find this?

quote:

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Supposing what you are saying is true, how would you reasonably explain that dragons and dinosaurs share a very similar structure?

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You tell me. Pterosaur? Edited by Nemesis Juggernaut, : No reason given.Edited by Nemesis Juggernaut, : No reason given.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Well, for instance, Animal Diversity 2nd Edition*, a undergraduate-level text on cladistics, shows that, within the Diapsids, snakes and lizards are lepidosaurs; dinosaurs and pterosaurs, like birds and crocodiles, are archosaurians; and turtles are from an entirely different branch called the Anapsids.Cladistically-speaking there's no such thing as "reptiles". But even if they were, dinosaurs are far closer to birds than they are to any extant species we might call a reptile. (For instance, endothermic metabolism; active, upright posture; calciferous eggs.)*Hickman, Roberts, and Larson, 2000, McGraw Hill.

I am amazed that stupid shit like you post is still out there. For example, the top left image is simply a photoshopped creation, and we had a long discussion here at EvC a few years ago where I posted the original photos of the so called anasazi image. It is absolutely nothing but a very common serpent image where the nut jobs have taken some weathering and added the body and legs.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I've seen photographs of a hunter with a four-foot-long grasshopper that are waaaay more convincing than that.Seriously, why do you even waste time on such nonsense? If there were flocks of dinosaurs roaming the earth today, so @#$%ing what?

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“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place”
-- Joseph Goebbels
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