Jordan-Smith criticized the lack of evidence given to prove why dragon myths could not have been passed from culture to culture.

An Instinct for Dragons, hypothesis about the origin of dragon myths.

The story is probably a recontextualisation of a much older dragon myth, put into a new historical context in late medieval folklore.

The pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of many cultures is probably no accident.

The George and the dragon myth is much older than christianity.

So were the Komodo dragons the origin of the Chinese dragon myths?

It seems likely that the dragon myth comes from other, less literal, tendencies of that dark, history-laden organ that we call the human mind.

Such wayward crocodiles may have inspired dragon myths.

But there is another obvious source for the dragon myth: the bones of dinosaurs and extinct mammals.

Of course, there are living reptiles that could have inspired dragon myths.