Our 2007 'Dragon Fossil' Was a TV Prop. China Found a Real One
In 2007 we fell for a dragon carcass from a TV docudrama. In 2024 scientists described something much closer to the real thing, from the same Chinese province.
On 30 June 2007 we posted a "China dragon fossil": a horned, winged creature said to be on show at a fossil museum in Anshun, Guizhou, described in the report as a Triassic sea reptile about 200 million years old. We added that it probably couldn't fly or breathe fire. It went on to 478,827 views, our third most-read post ever, and the comments ran to 57 pages.
The comments are where the story is. Within six months readers had worked out that the photo wasn't a fossil at all. It was a model from The Last Dragon, a 2004 Channel 4 docudrama (shown in the US as Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, narrated by Patrick Stewart), in which scientists examine a dragon found frozen in a cave in Romania. In January 2008 we agreed in the comments that it looked more like a film prop in a workshop. After that the page became a long and very earnest argument about whether dragons ever existed, which is probably why people kept coming back.
A better answer arrived in February 2024. A team from Scotland, Germany, the US and China published a full description of Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, a 240-million-year-old marine reptile from Guizhou, the same province as our 2007 story. It was about 16 feet (5 metres) long and mostly neck, with a long, snake-like body. Nick Fraser of National Museums Scotland said it was "reminiscent of the long and snake-like, mythical Chinese Dragon". No wings and no fire, but it lived in the sea that covered that part of China, and it looks the part.
So our 2007 headline was wrong about the photo and, as it turns out, not far wrong about Guizhou.
The original page, with all 57 pages of argument, is on the Internet Archive.
