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Do you think dragons were real at some point? This was a subject brought up in a different guild and it got some...interesting answers from people. I think that maybe in the dinosaur ages, a dinosaur much like the body of a raptor only larger and had wings could have existed. The whole breathing fire thing though, that is something I don't think a dragon that could have existed could do. Wyverns could have existed too in the times of dinosaurs. The only thing that throws off the theory of dragons being real is pretty much fossil remains of some sort. Wouldn't there be bones of a dragon body somewhere? Though there is probably a lot more things that also indicate they were never real. I don't know if anyone here has seen 'Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real' but it is a pretty good movie explaining what the dragons' past was if a body was found and scientists studied it. So, what do you think? Do you think they could have been real? Do you think they were real? Or perhaps do you think something else entirely on this?
♣~Discuss~♣

Of course dragons aren't real. Most cultures also have a vampires, demons, and numerous other things that are common to nealy all cultures but most people are sensible enough to know that they aren't real.
Reptiles self-mummify. They naturally preserve better than any other creature, making it more certain than ever that they would leave fossils.
((More to follow.))

Here is the promised continuation:
To go onward, dragons don't just breath fire. In addition to multiple accounts, some dragons have other breath weapons. They also have steel-hard scales and teeth. Some legends say that they have the best attributes of both cold and warm blooded creatures, all sorts of supernatural abilities, and sometimes not only sentience but intellect greater than human intelligence.
So you can't just take away breath weapons. You have to take away everything else. If you define dragons as just flying reptiles, then yeah, they existed, but everyone else calls them pterodactyls and if you want to appear to be educated, you will, too.
As for dragons on other planets... Well, they certainly aren't things like those on the moon or mars, but if there are aliens that just so happen to have a similar appearance to dragons, aliens are simply aliens. Appearance to established mythological creatures would be completely coincidental.

Mmm, that is true. I would like to believe in dragons, but I think that if they did exist, they would not live on earth, for many reasons. 1) we are polluting the planet, 2) they would be killed once their weaknesses are found out, 3) the earth is a mess that humans continue to mess up, 4) if they are smarter than humans, than they know that to stay alive, they must look like us.
Another theory is, that in the long ago past, someone saw this unknown winged creature, and named it a dragon. From there, the rumors get worse and worse, and eventually it will be blamed for bad happenings that are really more likely caused by humans than a so-called 'dragon'. A bit like witches, they would be used to leave innocent virgins that probably pissed some men off out in the open to die, or to kill them and blame it all on dragons. We might never know for sure, and I say that's a good thing, keeps our imaginations working.

The "breath of life" you mentioned... I did some research online. And I found it mentioned countless times, with countless variations on it's meanings and true nature. However, one continually recurring common word included defining oriental dragons was "water." So perhaps, and this is just a wild guess, there's a story behind it that spread to a rumor, to a legend.

Perhaps there was a river that flowed some kind of rock formation (perhaps a mountain) that resembled a dragon somewhere in the ancient orient, and from this river a town grew. People living in the town would no doubt worship this 'dragon' with the 'breath of life'-giving water. Travelers who came to and from the town would see the mountain and spread the word of dragons with the 'breath of life,' and word would spread, eventually developing into the "breath of life" that some dragons possessed.

That's only one of many possibilities, of course. It's probably not right, but maybe it's a step in the right direction.

Matt, you truly are to dragons as I am to undead. We can all learn a great deal on this subject by listening to you. Hopefully, some blatant bastardization of them won't be made immensely popular and you won't have to suffer as I have...
I will have to stand by my reptilian statement, assuming the most commonly accepted European dragon most familiar to us today is the one in question. While birds legs have areas that are somewhat scale-like I cannot say they resemble any common dragon-patterns to the scales and they typically have all the other reptilian features in the areas of body type and structure (such as tail structure, build, limb-placement, etc). They clearly were not a type of fish in any of the popular myth, even if some were swimmers, and while there are mammals with spines (and one that I cannot recall that had "fur" that had been modified by evolution so that they looked like a type of scale) I cannot say that any bear any remote resemblance to dragons. Even taking these as scales would be a significant stretch. Smooth-bodied amphibians are also not something that I see as being a real possibility for this sort of dragon.

I further agree with Matt. Putting the question of guns into the question is very much missing the point. Were dragons real and sentient, they'd have taken over quite quickly and we wold know them as masters. We'd have most likely never been able to develop any weapons capable of destroying them, except in the most abject of secrecy.

When we say "no weaknesses" let's not forget a few key things before getting ahead of ourselves. I believe that Matt meant "No weaknesses not possessed by every other creature out there." Let's not forget that in accordance with standard lore dragons must eat, dragons must sleep, dragons must breathe.
Furthermore, there have never been, on any creature that has ever been (even in any mythology I've heard of) armored eyes. If you stab something deeply enough through the eye (and it's brain lies in a linear bath behind it) then it's going to die (unless it lacks a brain, as a plant--though I've yet to see a brain with eyes--, is an artificial, non-mechanical creature like a golem or other such thing, or isn't dependent on it's brain, such as undead that can't trace their roots farther back than Hollywood, and a few other exceptions). The same is true of the esophagus, so if you can get into the mouth and avoid the teeth long enough, then you're also going to kill it.
Actually all orifices are similarly vulnerable. I've seen more than one painting/stained glass window depicting St. George stabbing the dragon with a lance through it's nostril.
I also once read a comic that envisioned a fire-breathing dragon as being dependent on breathing fire. He sort of muzzled it by entangling it's mouth with his cape and it was consumed by its own internal fire before it could escape... Though that isn't the sort of dragon that I follow and it doesn't fit into my conception of a dragon very well.
Just having no special, outstanding weaknesses doesn't mean that it's unkillable, so long as it shares the typical (almost) universally shared weakness of mortality.