Dragon

Many cultures have their own version of the dragon. IT's likely to be because somebody stumbled upon some old dinosaur bones and realised that there were ancient creatures which roamed the earth. Fossil fuels are basically ancient organic matter.

We're accustomed to thinking that dinosaurs are extinct animals. They are poster boys for animals that went extinct a long time ago. But when you look at the history, they actually were around for almost a hundred million years. Whereas we are on the brink of extinction already after only having been around for a million years, and maybe we've had 5 thousand years of quote unquote civilisation.

To be sure, dinosaurs are animals. They've never achieved anything remotely comparable to what we've achieved. But they've managed to live within the system for millions of years, and that is something that we human beings will never achieve. The probability that human beings will be living on this planet, the way that we live today, in 1 million years' time is pretty close to 0.