Re: Dragons

[hwchoy@zpovc.enet.dec.com (On a foul day, you can complain forever.)]

>of what the remains may represent.  It is interesting that the Chinese 
>are known to have interpreted dinosaur remains as dragon remains 
>and that htese too breathed fire.  I think that it came from a belief that 
>dragons came from the sky (because they were large and no-one had 
>seen one alive on Earth) and that the sun was also in the sky.  When 
>you put the two together you get fire breathing dragons!  It may be a 
>bit simplistic to put it in such terms, maybe someone else has a 
>better interpretation.
>
>Neil Clark
>Curator of Palaeontology
>Hunterian Museum
>University of Glasgow
>email: NCLARK@museum.gla.ac.uk


Completely off the subject here, but Chinese mythology has a large 
multitude of dragons. There are a class of dragons that live in bodies 
of water (they have palaces under the sea and crabs and shrimps are the 
soldiers and generals :). One of their duties is to bring rain as 
instructed by the Heavenly Deity. If they fail in their duties they get 
their horns plucked, their pearls confiscated and banished to be a 
horse. A good reference would be the ancient (12th century I believe) 
fantasy novel "Journey to the West", I believe you get find them in 
English translations.

rgds,
heng-wah