I believe that the strong tradition of dragons in Chinese folklore is down to dinosaurs. My theory is that dinosaurs held out far longer in isolated pockets of mainland China than they did elsewhere. We all know China is a trove of undiscovered fossils and new-to-you dinosaur species! If only they'd let us get in there with some decent large-scale paleontological expeditions, I bet we'd find evidence that populations of dinosaurs heretofore unknown to science had held on long past the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction boundary. Perhaps even surviving into historical or near-historical times.
I admit, I have no hypothesis as to how these 'saurs could have made it through the plummeting temperatures that claimed all their kin on land and in the seas. I do tend to back the theorists who cite a relatively narrow range of temperature in which dino eggs could incubate and hatch, as being the root cause of the big die-out. So how could these dinosaurs have beaten that seemingly unbeatable sucker-punch?
Ancient Chinese Secret, huh?
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