Elder friend Airis, if such as that you are: How does this bond to humanity aid the dragon? How does it protect them that they cannot achieve themselves? Why humans?

Silver: I must quote now a video game (Brute Force): "Preach it."

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"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

I still say we're just food.

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The devil doesn't come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you've ever wished for.

-Tucker Max

Right now, methinks we're the feasters, not the feasted upon.

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"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

*glances over shoulder nervously and repeatedly* When did this devolve to feasting!?

Anyway now that I think about it they should be under animal and vertibrate, but past that it is kind of up in the air, we don't know much past the theoretical about their physiology so we can't determine whether they are birds, reptiles, mammals, or something else entirely. They might even be extraterrestrial in origin, I mean, the Mayan culture depicted a spaceship looking thing in their temples to Quetzalcoatl. Don't ask me to cite that, it was on some Discovery channel show a while back. Or maybe it was history or scifi, anyway, just pitching in another two cents.

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Anything is Possible...
And Yet, Nothing is Probable.

But Quetzalcoatl was at first described as just a "snake like" creature, and without its feathers. And he has had been shown as a human. I really can't site that either as of now, I am looking at "Gods of the Maya, Aztecs and Incas." and don't have the time to look it up right now.

But I get what you are saying, but that is the easy way out of dragons. By just saying "They are not an earth like creature." Even the grays have an better description than that.

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The victories from those skilled in warfare are not considered of great wisdom or courage, because their victories have no miscalculations
- SUN-TZU

Are putting Quetzalcoatl in with dragons? That just makes a true classification even harder...

_________________
"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

In fact most of the new world "dragons", don't really fit into the idea of what we think of as a dragon.

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The victories from those skilled in warfare are not considered of great wisdom or courage, because their victories have no miscalculations
- SUN-TZU

I think that stand my earlier point, that there needs to be lots of different classifications within 'dragon'.

_________________
"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

That was the point of the thread. The name dragon has been given away too much, and we need to draw the lines to seprate them.

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The victories from those skilled in warfare are not considered of great wisdom or courage, because their victories have no miscalculations
- SUN-TZU

Let's work from here:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: 'Dragon'
Order:

Is that good so far? Suggest some plausible Orders.

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"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

Well leaving out Otherkin wouldn't really be right.
Spiritual?

But then again, Dragon otherkin are then split down into those who believe they are dragons *now*, those who believe they can temporarily mentally shift into a dragon and those who believe they once were one. More branches for the tree!

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The skeletons are playing a jig for you ...
... let's give 'em a merry dance
Aka Respergo

Make 'Spiritual' an order, and we divide it up the rest of the way within Family, Genus, and Species, I suppose.

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"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

What would the ancestor of the dragons be? A croc, a dino, a pterosaur, a coelurosauravus, a rauisuchian, or something else entirely?

Now that, I think, I'll keep my two cents out of. I might do something with someone else's pennies, though.

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"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.

Those have all been proven to be the anscestors of a single-celled organism- that could be a dragons' ancestor. Minues several billion generations, but hey!

And this is coming from someone who only believes in them spiritually. Fun.

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The skeletons are playing a jig for you ...
... let's give 'em a merry dance
Aka Respergo

Nothing has really been proven to be descendant of a single-celled organism except more of the same. In fact, Darwin was certain that there'd be about 12000% more evidence of evolution than there is.

Aside from that, a sold theory.

_________________
"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it's lightning that does the work." ~Samuel Clemens

Mah Griffon is © Todd Lockwood.