Rome Hunted Dragons to Extinction — Then Cuvier Decided They Had Never Existed

Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Norse, Welsh, Aztec, Aboriginal — independently described the same creature. Then Christian saints "killed" the last one. Then Georges Cuvier decided they had never existed at all. But in 1910, a Dutch officer shot one on a shipping route Europeans had been using for four hundred years. This is the story of what the ancients called dragons — what the bones in Wawel Cathedral might actually be — and the pattern of erasure that took every continent's largest predators out of human memory. SOURCES & REFERENCES Primary ancient texts: — Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 8 (77 AD) — Aristotle, Historia Animalium (4th century BC) — Livy, Periochae 18 (1st century BC) — Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, 1.8.ext.19 — Silius Italicus, Punica, Book 6 — Marco Polo, The Travels (c. 1300) — The Secret History of the Mongols (13th century) — Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon, 8th–11th century) — The Mabinogion (medieval Welsh) — Wincenty Kadłubek, Chronica Polonorum (12th century)