Dragons or large serpent-like creatures are so common in mythology and folklore that we should suspect that there are some grains of truth behind them that we have lost sight of - something more than just imagination and fairy stories. Modern dragon lore is mainly fantasy - few of the people who write about them have ever encountered even one little dragon. Apart from occasional tales of sea serpents no reliable reports of dragon sightings have reached Euroamerica in the past eight hundred years, but early in the seventeenth century some European naturalists were still writing about them as if they were common knowledge.

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://martinifisher.com/2021/06/28/book-talk-dragons/