From ancient myths to Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, dragons have appeared in stories or as long as humans have been telling them. But they didn’t always take their fire-breathing, gold-hoarding form that’s familiar today. Learn how the fiery creatures of lore are intertwined in our environment — and meet some of the real dragons that walk the earth today.
1. Global Influence
“Dragons, or snake-like creatures resembling dragons, appear in almost all cultures around the world,” says Daniel Stoll, a UW–Madison literary studies PhD student and graduate associate of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment. Though their forms vary slightly — from ancient Mesopotamia’s snakelike creatures with venomous bites to bearers of luck and fortune across Chinese history to villainous hoarders of Western literature — dragons transcend time and place.
2. Real-World Roots
When Dan Katcher modeled Game of Thrones’ dragons, or when Peter, Paul, and Mary sang about the friendly Puff, they had plenty of reference material. So how did ancient storytellers across the world imagine a similar creature? “Some scholars, like Adrienne Mayor, suggest that the popularity of dragons in literature, storytelling, and mythology could have been the direct result of ancient people(s) discovering fossils of dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals,” says Stoll.
3. A Fiery Debut
The first fire-breathing dragon appeared in English literature in the 8th-century epic poem Beowulf. “Beowulf survived hundreds of years in a single medieval manuscript, and it was almost lost in a fire in 1731,” Stoll says. “The manuscript suffered some fire damage, and in several places the fire damage in the manuscript is right around where the dragon appears.” Coincidence?
4. Inspiring More than Literature
Many modern works, including The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, use dragons to symbolize destruction, greed, and even ecological change. It’s appropriate, then, that the discovery of one of the world’s most harmful chemicals can be linked to dragons.
“There is an ancient symbol from Egyptian iconography called the ‘ouroborus,’ which depicts a dragon/snake eating its own tail: a symbol for rebirth,” Stoll explains. “The German chemist August Kekule von Stradonitz discovered the benzene [ring] after he had a vision of the ouroborus in a dream.”
Benzene, a byproduct of combustion found in cigarette smoke and car exhaust, causes smog, contaminates water, and has been linked to bone marrow cancers.
5. Real Dragons at Risk
Dragons don’t just exist in folklore across the world, but in very real ecosystems. You’ve probably encountered at least one of the 3,000-plus species of dragonflies, or perhaps you’ve stopped to smell the snapdragons. And depending on where you live, you might have come face to face with any number of reptilian dragons, like the enormous Komodo dragon to a cuddly pet bearded dragon.
But many of the world’s real dragons are at risk of becoming just legends due to our rapidly changing climate, habitat loss, and pollution. More than 100 “dragons” are classified as endangered or critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.
Among them are the dragon snail, found only in hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean; the Dragoncillo del Cabo de Gata, a snapdragon flower found on just a 12-square-mile area in Spain’s Cabo de Gata-Níjar Geopark; and the pocket-sized Victorian grassland earless dragon which was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered 2023.
