Ancient humans found dragon bones, giant reptile skeletons, lying out in the open, but they were unlike the bones of any lizard or snake or amphibians that they knew. Their pelvic bones were very different; they closely resembled those of birds. The obvious conclusion: that meant these giant reptiles could fly! Moreover, their bones were made of stone! Impervious to fire! Putting two and two together, they knew that these animals must be the source of the fire that came down from the sky, setting forests on fire. They were fire-breathing. It all made sense. And the legends of dragons were born from this early attempt at scientific logic.
Indeed, a fundamental characteristic of dinosaurs is the bird-like structure of their pelvic bones. That's why modern scientists believe that the birds are the only living descendants of the dinosaurs. Moreover, the earliest fossils were found out in the open. When Darwin came to South America, he didn't have to dig to find the fossilized bones of the giant sloth. Erosion exposed such bones, and in areas low on people, those bones stayed around until collected by prehistoric humans. And prehistoric humans knew the bone structure of animals far better than does the average modern man, with the exception of the modern butcher; that's because ancient people were their own butchers.
No wonder the legends of dragons are so widespread, as widespread as the fossils of dinosaurs. How else could ancient humans have interpreted these finds?
But pelvic bones are insufficient to enable flight. The link to lightning was false. The interpretation of the stone bones was wrong; it indicated that they were ancient, fossilized, not contemporary. So, alas, no, dragons don't exist.
Moreover, we now know that large animals cannot have sufficient strength in their wings to fly, at least if they are made of muscle as we know it. The biggest you can get is a condor, and that bird arguably glides; it can't take off from level ground. This is a consequence of the physics calculation of how much air you have to push downwards to support weight; as you get bigger, the weight increases as the cube of the dimension, but the strength of the muscles (depends on the cross-section) increases only as the square. So when you get to something larger than a meter, the muscle strength of animals is not sufficient. A similar inverse argument accounts for the fact that ants and other insects seem incredibly strong. But make an ant big, and it could not carry its own weight.
These arguments don't mean that you can't name something a dragon, be it a Komodo Dragon, a Nile Crocodile, or a dragon fly. But the dragons of legend don't exist and never did.
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So ?