Discover Top Posts Tagged with #saint gotthard

Bartolomeo della Gatta - Meeting of Saint Rochu with Saint Gotthard. 1480

#art #renaissance #bartolomeo della gatta #saint roch #saint gotthard #dog

It seems that everytime somebody says that dragon myths were inspired by dinosaur fossils (or worse, living dinosaurs), be it professionals like Adrienne Mayor or one of the millions of amateurs spreading misinformation on the internet and other media, it seems to turn out one of three cases:

The dragon story in question is actually associated with fossils of cenozoic mammals.

The connection to fossils is mostly conjecture and doesn't hold under scrutiny.

It's a generalized statement about dragons in general that simply isn't true.

Indeed, the connection between dinosaur fossils and dragons seemingly first appears in a time when dinosaur fossils started to be described scientifically and is always made by people who already know what dinosaur fossils really are.

But now it seems like I've found an actual connection of a local dragon legend to actual dinosaur fossils. Take this with a grain of salt, because the legend, like most folklore, has only been recorded in 1850 by folklorist Ignaz Zingerle and thus may be younger than the scientific discovery of dinosaurs.

But Zingerle records two legends about dragons living in a cave above Castel San Gottardo in Mezzocorona, Italy. The stories themselves are nothing out of the ordinary, one telling about a venomous basilisk being slain by a knight luring it with milk and distracting it with a mirror before the knight himself dies from the venom, while the other tells about saint Gotthard killing a dragon with a cross.

Now comes the interesting part: In the year 2004, paleontologists found fossil footprints near the castle and identified them as various species of Archosaurs, among them some dinosaurs.

I'd love to hear some opinions about this, but these footprints to me seem to be the only actual dinosaur fossils with associated dragon legends that I could find.

Sources:

Justin B. Delair, William A. S. Sarjeant (1975), The Earliest Discoveries of Dinosaurs, Isis, Vol. 66, No. 1, https://www.jstor.org/stable/229523

Spencer McDaniel (2020), Were Mythical Creatures Inspired by Fossils?, Tales of Times Forgotten

Lida Xing, Adrienne Mayor (2011), The Folklore of Dinosaur Trackways in China: Impact on Paleontology, Historical Biology 18(4):213-220 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10420940.2011.634038

Friedrich August Quenstedt (1856), Sonst und jetzt: populäre Vorträge über Geologie, Laupp'sche Buchhandlung, pp 30-47 & 56-57

W.J.T. Mitchell (1998), The Last Dinosaur Book, The University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226532042

Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle (1891), Sagen aus Tirol, pp. 185 - 187

Simone D’Orazi Porchetti, Umberto Nicosia, Paolo Mietto, Fabio Massimo Petti (2008), Atreipus-like footprints and their co-occurrence with Evazoum from the upper Carnian (Tuvalian) of Trentino-Alto Adige, Studi Trentini di Scienze Naturali, Acta Geol. 83, pp. 277-287

#dinosaur #dragonslayer #saint gotthard