Science never quite arrives at the truth about the natural world, but over time it tends to get closer to it.
The most cautious investigators of old bones who did not speculate about the critters breathing fire were likely not as popularly attended to as those that did. There was "junk science" in old times just as there is now.
I agree. I’m not even sure some flying reptiles did not coexist with man. Herodotus has a lot of interesting and specific information about dragons that made me think it is possible.
We mock ancient sources at some risk. They said the same thing about Troy and the Mycenian cities and king and wars. They found Troy miles inland since the sea has gone down, and know from archaeology they had advanced civilizations without a written language, etc. They managed to dig tunnels through a mountain to meet in the middle in those times.
Interesting things you would likely never find today were lying on the surface in prehistory, such as native gold and metals, meteorites, etc, when the human population was very low and always had been.
Maybe the flood happened, but it was an ice age, viewed through oral history passed down through millenia of people who couldn’t conceive of devastation from ice, and probably the meanings of the words in their stories shift to weather they had experienced. Perhaps the Ark people sailed to safety to a tropical area. Or maybe the flood they escaped and passed down orally was when the sea rose as the ice age ended.
Herodotous writes that “The form of the serpent is like that of the water-snake; but he has wings without feathers, and as like as possible to the wings of a bat.”.
If you google snakes spitting venom, found: “Spitting cobras protect themselves by shooting jets of venom into the eyes of their attackers. A new study suggests that over the course of several million years, all three groups of spitters independently tailored the chemistry of their toxins in the same way to cause pain to a would-be predator.“
I’m not a dragon or dinosaur “fan” or a young earther geology sceotic btw. I just think if Herodotus says it there is some “grain of” truth.