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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 8853250" data-attributes="member: 58172">In reallife medieval bestiaries, the dragon (Latin draco ‹ Greek drakon) is a species of snake, a serpent. The texts describe the Central African rock python, which can grow to lengths over 20 feet. But the stylized illustrations can get wild.Due to ignorance about Africa and under the influence of mythic traditions about flying serpents, especially in Revelation in the Christian Bible, medieval Europe began to depict the draconic snake with wings, whence often both wings and talons of a bird. Because of locomoting by means of slithering the long serpentine body, there was uncertainty about whether the talons were more like legs (like a bird with a long tail) or more like arms (like the D&D linnorm and salamander). One illustration depicts the draconic snake with eight limbs: one set of wings with the arms and an other set of wings with the legs. Afterward, the snake often appeared with six limbs: arms and legs, plus wings.Meanwhile, the Roman military standard for cavalry was called a "draco". This serpentine wind-sock banner moved like snake thru the air when holding it aloft while speeding on horseback. Different cavalry units would have different animal heads on their draco as its insignia. Some had lion heads, some wolf heads, and so on. The Roman cavalry introduced the concept of the draco across Europe. The concept the draco even reached Nordic lands. The Norse called it the dreki.Thus medieval imagination came to visualize the exotic snake as having features that resembled those of other animals. The Norse dragon (dreki) typically exhibits features of adder snake, including actual horns in place of the adders hornlike V-pattern, plus lionlike head and mouth, and eaglelike arms. They are born as normal adder snakes, then while maturing, they shed their skin to reveal horns, then eaglelike arms. Never legs. The Norse dragon typically has two armlike limbs, but at a great age, they can shed their skin to reveal eaglelike wings, totaling four limbs.By contrast, the Welsh dragon (ddraig) typically exhibits six limbs: an adder, with wolflike head, scaly wolflike body but ravenlike hands and feet, and batlike wings. In any case, all of these concepts of dragon are explicitly a kind of snake.Of course, the reallife snake itself evolves from a snakelike slithering animal, whose limbs became vestigial, then losing the forelimbs, then the hindlimbs.The reappearance of limbs of the dragon resembles both snake atavism and further evolutionary mutation, including "draconid" species with two, four, or six limbs.In this history, dragons are "serpents": class Reptilia, suborder Serptentes, and genus Draco.</blockquote>

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