I don’t see a dinosaur. I see a dragon, which is a mythical creature with a long history in Eurasian folklore. So, the better question is, why do dragons look so much like dinosaurs.
I don’t see a dinosaur. I see a dragon...
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I agree.
The body in the imnage shown doesn’t look much different from any other quadraped, except perhaps for claws and a few scales. Then take a long neck and tail from the dragon myth and voila. The head even looks more like an asian style dragon’s head, not so much like a dinosaur.
Also, we don’t really know what dinosaurs looked like anyway, just what their fossilized bones look like. Most of the rest is theory and educated reconstruction.
DaVinci was visually and spacially very creative. Why does an anatomically realistic looking ‘dragon’ drawing surprise anyone?
“...the better question is, why do dragons look so much like dinosaurs.”
Or vice versa.
da Vinci could easily have seen a skeleton, since lost. Lots of Renaissance folks collected "curiosities".
Who says they do. Dragons look like how we IMAGINE dinosaurs looked. Maybe. Unless they had feathers, or something else. In the long run dragons are big lizards, and we think dinosaurs were big lizards, and oddly we draw big lizards like big lizards.
Well, when you look at a dragon's bones (er, fossilized dinosaur bones in the rocks) you SEE EXACTLY what Leonardo drew. Twisted long back, legs, head, eye and "nose" sockets - everything fits what the people saw everyday as they slaughtered and cooked cows and pigs and sheep for food.
Recent archaeological findings show hat dinosaurs looked more like birds than lizards. Heck, birds ARE dinosaurs of the clade aves.
So this picture is of a lizard, dragon. While dinosaurs looked like giant moa or otherwise.