In the sixteenth century, some people found a fossilized skull they thought belonged to a dragon – proving the lindwurm legend. As it turned out, the skull belonged instead to a wooly mammoth. That sort of confusion may have been at the root of all dragon myths, as well as stories surrounding other mythical creatures.

As a scientific discipline, paleontology was born in the 18th and early 19th centuries because of the work from scientists such as Charles Lyell and Georges Cuvier. But people have been finding fossils as long as humans have walked the earth. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of fossils and concluded from them that Egypt had once been under water (and described some of the bones he examined as having belonged to winged serpents).

Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist and historian of ancient science at Stanford University, has argued that ancient people conceived dragons and other mythical creatures after finding fossils of even more ancient creatures. In her book The First Fossil Hunters, Mayor shows how fossils influenced Greek and Roman stories about bygone creatures — and not just dragons. She also says that the idea of human giants and larger-than-life heroes could have come from the discovery of the outsized bones of prehistoric mammals.