Silver_Geko: So there has never really been any physical evidence found?
Dr. Hogarth: No real evidence of dragons. There's a lot of evidence of what people thought were dragons, such as dinosaur and other fossil remains, giant snakes — things they thought might be dragons, but which were something else, and not dragons. So no, there was evidence, but not evidence of dragons. People believed in dragons, so when they came across remains of large, dead animals, they sometimes thought they were dragons.
dragonlover: Dragons rule!!! If they could be real today, where could they live?
Dr. Hogarth: I suppose where they always lived, in peoples' imaginations! If you look in the medieval descriptions of dragons, they were usually in far-off places like India or Ethiopia, a place people didn't travel to. So if you were to hear of them today, they'd probably be in some remote and far-off place, up a distant mountain or an unexplored river. That's where I'd look if I were going to look for dragons.
Styx3: Did you have any other ideas on how dragons breathed fire besides the platinum theory?
Dr. Hogarth: It's the setting fire to the dragon that's the problem. I think our ideas were hydrogen and air mixing and exploding, and the only way we could think of it to work was the powdered platinum. We wondered if they could strike a spark against their teeth. Large dinosaurs did ingest stones to help digest their food, but the stones couldn't be large enough. There was the possibility of electricity. There are animals that create amounts of electricity — electric eels and electric rays — but they couldn't generate a spark, so the platinum theory seemed to be the best.
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