Forgotten Ages Research

Where Did All the Dragons Come From?—Exploring the Global Menagerie of Mysterious Monsters, Part One

Report Topics:

• The persistent image of the Dragon in most world cultures has hidden implications, and are linked with ways of opening the collective consciousness of humanity into making connections with far distant ages, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
• Artistic expressions of Dragon figures in North America, Central America, South America, the Pacific region and Australia.



Full Report:

An Introduction to New Concepts—

Wherever we look throughout the world among the higher and more sophisticated cultures of both the past and present, we find the persistent portrayal in their art, sculpture and architecture of the figure of the dragon. In olden times the dragon was considered merely a mythic creature that—because of its colorful nature, renowned fierceness, great power and mystical wisdom—had universal appeal. But in our modern science-oriented society, several important observations can be made on many levels concerning the secrets of its age-old existence.

First, from a purely psychological view, the universality of dragons suggests they are an important aspect of the collective unconsciousness of all humanity, serving as a basic archetype for the primordial energies of nature, those elemental forces which, whether we like it or not, continually shape our fates and destinies. Sometimes dragons personify those raw natural energies that, despite our best human efforts, we cannot ever hope to bring under our control. The more we fight them, the more we seem to be defeated and overwhelmed by their obstinance, so that in the end our best tactic becomes one of compromise and cooperation, whereby we form a symbiotic relationship with such powers in order that we may eventually learn their secrets and wisdom for ourselves.

Yet at the same time dragons also epitomize not just a symbolic aspect of our psyche, but something that lurks much deeper, in the broader collective memories of the Earth itself. It is as if beyond our myths and Jungian archetypes, we are recalling bygone ages when our most distant ancestors—those soul influxes who inhabited our planet long before our own arrival here as a collective soul being—actually lived and co-existed with dragon-like animals we recognize today from the fossil record as dinosaurs.

Hundreds of out-of-place artifacts that have been uncovered in the geologic record testify that other human-like forms similar to ourselves once walked this planet, evolved along their own lines of development and even constructed their own civilizations hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of these anomalous findings show that such remote inhabitants who were here prior to us had had direct contact with dinosaurs, and either fought with them or lived with them peacefully.

What has happened is that all these memories that have accumulated over an incredible period of time, that coalesced together from a myraid of previous past soul influx experiences, have become an essential part of the Earth’s own collective unconsciousness. Time and time again, at moments of heightened intellectual and artistic inspiration, the visionary geniuses in our own past and present cultures have been able to tap into this vast pool of primordial planetary memories, and in their art have “remembered” the former human-dinosaur relationships in the far distant past, expressing these through creating multiple images of the dragon.

Equally noteworthy is that each and every world culture in which the dragon makes a significant artistic appearance is one that either has a predominant religion that practices some disciplinary form of deep meditation, self-mastered enlightenment, channeled spirit or ancestor communications, or ecstatic shamanism—or has spiritual leaders and healers who partake in a variety of natural herbal, chemical, psychedelic and hallucinogenic compounds that induce powerful visionary experiences. Any one of these many avenues serve to open inner doorways of expanded and awakened consciousness into the collective memories of both humanity and the planet.

The reason why this very avant-garde and leading-edge concept is more than just a vague speculation is the fact that—because of the development of the science of paleontology during the past two centuries, and through our resulting modern ability to carry out detailed studies of the saurian fossil record—we can now fully recognize and classify the majority of world-wide dragon artistic expressions as paralleling point for point the unique physical features of many very real dinosaur species. Even though these saurians have been extinct for many millions of years, nevertheless they are accurately portrayed and very distinguishable in dragon art forms found all over the world and in all cultural backgrounds.

This astounding ability to have been able to clearly observe and artistically depict dinosaurs from past distant ages means that some intelligent beings had to have first been present there, personally witnessed and interacted with such creatures, and clearly visualized their imagery as part of their own collective memory and experience. Such primeval intelligent beings disappeared with the dinosaurs long ago, but their memories somehow became an integral part of the psychic dimension of the planet itself, which in our more recent history has been the source from which such memories were passed on to us, channeled as artistic inspirations.

Let us now explore just a few examples of such distant memory inter-connections, as they are testified to in the art renderings of the dragon figure all over the globe and throughout many cultures and time periods.

North America—

In the autumn of 1924 what became known as the Doheny Scientific Expedition journeyed through previously unexplored portions of the Hava Supai Canyon in Arizona. The Expedition was headed by Dr. Samuel Hubbard, curator of archaeology for California’s Oakland Museum of Natural History. One of the unexpected items discovered by the team was a large petroglyph of what was identified by several of the participants as a Tyrannosaurus Rex or related Allosaurus—an upright standing fierce saurian carnivore—surrounded by a group of stick-figured humans brandishing spears in an attitude of trying to attack it. Hubbard described the scene depicted:

“Taken all in all, the proportions (between saurian and the human hunters) are good. The dinosaur is depicted in the attitude in which man would be most likely to see it—reared on its hind legs, balancing with the long tail, and either feeding or in fighting position, possibly defending itself against a party of men.”

Skeptics, looking at the photographs the Expedition took of the petroglyph, have made a number of objections about the T-Rex’s portrayal. First, they claim its neck is too long, and the end part hangs down, not a typical pose for this species. However, a closer examination reveals that this oddity can be better explained as the saurian holding one of the human figures drooping limp in its mouth, which it has killed and is very likely about to eat.

Another perceived problem is that the creature’s tail looks far too long, and its terminal suddenly ends as a vertical line. But again, a closer scrutiny identifies this line as another human figure, this one standing too close to the T-Rex’s tail, and is about to get swept aside by its powerful swishing motion.

Also regarding the tail, critics point out that, in the 1920’s, reconstructions of tailed saurians showed such appendages as extending downward and laying flat on the ground. Yet we know today, examining the physiology of such beasts, that their tails were usually held straight out and constantly moved in the air parallel to the ground, to give them counter-balance at all times.

However, the most recent discovery made, based on upright dinosaur stepping maneuvers pressed in mud that later turned to stone, indicates that at certain times when a T-Rex or Allosaurus was severely threatened and under attack, it deliberately dropped its tail down and anchored itself to literally stand its ground. This was also the most efficient tail position for when it wanted to utilize this appendage to sweep back and forth for knocking down smaller foe attacking it from its rear—just as it is portrayed in the Hava Supai depiction, for its own defense.

Also very important is that the dinosaur is shown being confronted by human beings. Since there are no recent age saurian tracks or unfossilized remains in the vicinity, this event certainly did not take place during any recognized period in our own history, but had to have happened very long ago when dinosaurs roamed the planet. Yet the image itself on the Canyon wall was fairly recently fashioned—within the last ten or twelve thousand years—by an unknown artist who possessed a “memory” of such a confrontation, during what only could have been a forgotten remote time period when human-like beings and dinosaurs were contemporary to one another.

It is significant to note that the T-Rex figure was not the only petroglyph found in the Canyon. There are likewise images of a giant Mastodon lifting up with its trunk a human by their head, as well as other humans surrounding a large mammalian creature that is rearing up and hovers over them twice their size with a large cranium and arms outstretched, possibly a Megatherium. These represent the giant fauna of the post-dinosaur eras, belonging to a time-frame when the many contemporary pre-human simian species were not supposed to have evolved sufficiently enough to have directly interacted with them as a social unit in a hunting mode. Yet in sharp contrast, here we have in these pictures, once again, what appears to be a far more intelligent group of human-like beings who are engaged in well-organized pursuits of their prey.

The appearance of such animals as the Mastodon and the Megatherium, from a much later geologic period, also tells us that the distant memory-visionary experiences of the local shamanic artists were not exclusively limited to one era, that of the dinosaurs, but covered a much wider spectrum of the distant past. And even in these later periods, other intelligent human-like forms before our own evolved were also alive and inter-related with the now extinct creatures of the pre-Ice Age and Ice Age worlds. The collective “memory field” created by so vast a stretch of time and by so many past soul influxes is overwhelming to our comprehension. Yet the artistry testifies to the visions’ accuracy and veracity.

The Hava Supai images do not stand along, for the American Southwest is filled with prehistoric carved and painted glyphs which show creatures that hark back to other ages. One of these is prominently displayed on a rock wall of Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah, and is attributed to the Anasazi Peoples who inhabited the area in the fifth through the fourteenth centuries. The image is the unmistakable profile of an Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus, with a long massive tail, stocky short legs, a mountainous curved back and a long neck ending in a small head.

A related Anasazi artifact is on exhibit at the Manitou Cliff Dwellers Museum in Manitou Springs, Colorado. It is labed as being a “prayer stick” made from a wooden branch about a foot long and ending in the carved head of a “sacred bird” that possesses very unusual features. It has large eyes, a long pointed beak and an equally long pointed crest angled upward from its head,. The only known creature that has such a unique cranial configuration is a Pteronodon, a flying saurian that disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous era, 65 million years ago. It is believed this Anasazi prayer stick had belonged to a medicine shaman who utilized it for his vision quest. Of equal importance, the term “Manitou” was found in many Native American tribal vocabularies throughout theWest and Midwest, and its pronouncement invoked “the memories of the Ancestors.”

In Big Bend National Park in Texas is an area called Black Dragon Canyon, so named because of a very large petroglyph found there that looks like a giant winged reptile. It is painted in dark-red pigment, and its outstretched wings measure more then seven feet across. Members of a local Native American tribe, the Fremont Culture, who lived in the vicinity between 700 and 1250 A.D., are believed to be the artists. What is remarkable is that this image bears an uncanny resemblance to a species of Pterodactyl whose fossilized remains were not found until 1971, also in the Big Bend region. Recent reconstructions mirror the petroglyph point for point—long spindly legs with claws, incredibly huge wings that extended out nearly forty feet, a long giraffe-like neck and a small head with a lengthy beak, plus a bony crest on top of its cranium. This new species of Pterodactyl has been christened as Quetzalcoatus, named after the Aztec god whose appellation means “feathered serpent.”

The great-winged figure is reminiscent of legends and stories told by the medicine men of many tribes—stretching from the American Southwest to the Pacific Northwest and beyond into the Canadian coast on up into Alaska—concerning the sacred Thunderbird and Kolus Bird, the Message-Bringers who were seen in many visions and repeatedly portrayed on pottery, rug weavings, council teepees and long houses, ceremonial carvings and totem poles.

Other rock drawings, scattered throughout New Mexico and Colorado, depict other creatures sporting distinctively shaped faces and head-crests, which are identical with museum reproductions of such duck-billed dinosaurs as Parasaurolophus, Kritosaurus and Lambeosaurus. Some of these also show humans hunting them and even riding on their backs.

An historically famous petroglyph of a winged monster graces a cliff wall along the Missouri River, located just south of Alton, Illinois. It was first encountered by the early French explorers Louis Joliet and Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette in 1673. The Illini Tribe neighboring the river called it the Piasa Bird, and it was said to be the dreaded bringer of both weather storms and bad dreams.

The apparition was described as having had an incredible wingspan of fifty feet, yet had both feathers and scales. It also has claw-like feet, a long thin tail and a grimacing face with large teeth and is topped with antler-like horns. It bears some resemblace to a larger version of a Ramphorhynchus, a seagull-like flying saurian from the early Jurassic period.

So honored was this image that the indigenous inhabitants time and time again restored it by repainting it whenever it was badly weathered. In recent past years the outline had become so faded by erosion that the town of Alton commissioned to have it redone by local native artists, and their results can still be seen today, having become a popular tourist attraction.

Across country, among the rocky escarpments that line the Big Sandy River in Oregon are several petroglyph images of what the local Native American inhabitants identified as “water-panthers.” But rather than being a mammal, the very distinct form repeatedly depicted is more like that of a very large reptilian creature. It appears to have walked on all fours, with large legs that could have supported a great body weight. It had an elongated body and an equally long tail, plus an outstretched neck that ended in a small-sized head. Only in one instance does the head vaguely resemble that of a cat—the possible product of one maker’s exercise of artistic license in his imaginative enhancement, because it does not match any of the other depictions. In fact, it is the unusual precise portrait repetition among all the rest of the pictures which suggests that the imagery of the animal had a common collective source.

The most prominent aspect seen on all the Oregon monsters is that, extending from the neck all the way down the top of the back to the very end of the tail, there is a series of sharply pointed spikes. Some past authors have mistakingly identified these river ravine dragon figures as Stegasaurs, but these short backbone spikes are not anything like the very recognizeable double row of large prominent pointed broad plates of that well-known species of dinosaur. Besides, Stegasaurs have much shorter legs and walked much closer to the ground, rather than the much larger legged and generally larger build exhibited by the Big Sandy River petroglyph beasts. What they more exactly resemble is a species of Diplodocus, with precisely the same type of short pointed spikes down its back and tail.

Native American writer Vina Deloria spoke concerning local traditions about the “water-panthers” having once been seen in nearby lakes and streams, as well as in the Big Sandy ravine. However, no physical remains of such creatures have ever been found, not even in the local fossil record. Did they really exist in the flesh in recent history, or did indigenous shamans, in their vision quests to neighboring bodies of water, “see” the Diplodocus in their trances, then later accurately painted its outline many times upon the river’s stony walls?

Central America—

The figure of the dragon or “feathered serpent” was a very common motif seen in the pottery designs, tapestries, sculpture and architecture of practically every one of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures—beginning with the Olmecs, and extending through the succeeding Mayas, Tulans, Teotihuacans, Toltecs, Itzas, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, the Nahuatl and other Lake Cultures of central Mexico, and finally the Aztecs. Paralleling the dragon’s appearance was the widespread practice by the shamanic priesthood in each of these cultures of imbibing pulque and other hallucinogens that induced potent dreams and visions.

On the brightly painted murals of Bonampak in the southern Yucatan is the picture of a Mayan priest wearing a headdress with a serpentine dragon that bears an arresting similarity to the snake-like Elasmosaurus. In another one of the most famous images in Mayan art is the Palenque bas-relief of the great spiritual leader Pacal smoking a pipe and listening to an Oracle Priestess in the shape of a woman with a serpentine body, who is identified in the surrounding Mayan glyphs as the Vision Dragon. There was a deeply rooted tradition among all the Mesoamerican cultures for honoring the memories of distant Ancestors who were considered to be the source of long-lost secret Wisdom.

Among the cavern paintings from Oxtotitlan Cave in southern Mexico, recognized as being thousands of years old, is a drawing of an Olmec priest approaching a spotted dragon that stands and walks upright on its hind legs, has prominent claws and a long tail that supports its gait. In size the creature is taller than the pictured priest—so it cannot be a spotted jaguar, as some have tried to interpret it. Its form and attitude bears a more striking similarity to a known saurian species of Velociraptor, made famous by the Jurassic Park movies.

This particular cavern imagery is significant for two reasons. First, it shows the saurian being spotted—and it has only been in the last few years that several well-preserved sample impressions of fossilized dinosaur skin have revealed to contemporary paleontologists that many saurians, including Velociraptors, had multi-colored skin with distinguishing spots. Second, the Olmec priest is depicted wearing a ceremonial jade mask, with one hand raised up, and having an erect phallus. These are recognizeable artistic clues that show the priest was in an ecstatic trance, and that he was “seeing” the dragon-dinosaur in a visionary state.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has among its permanent displays the Denman Waldo Ross Collection of Prehispanic and Post-Hispanic white cottons and brocades from central Mexico. One piece, measuring eight and a quarter inches by seventeen inches, depicts in red, violet and yellow wool embroidery a repeating pattern of giant “eagles” and upright standing creatures with large claws and spiked backs. Anotamically, neither one of these animals corresponds to any of the extant fauna in the area where this cotton was crafted. However, they do match two species of saurians—Pteronodons and Velociraptors—the fossils of which have been unearthed in the same region.

Another cloth piece in this collection is a wool slit tapestry dating to the Late Intermediate Period, 1000 to 1400 A.D., and measures seven by eight inches, showing two creatures walking on all-fours with fairly long legs, humped body build, a long tail, a massive head with large mouth, a prominent horn rising from its beaked snout, and a fan-like shield protruding from the back of the cranium. Even though the art form is highly stylized, it can still be classified as a Styracosaurus, one of the species of Cerotops, with its distinctive horns and single armor shield that covered the back of the head.

The Gardiner Museum in Toronto displays an earthenware bowl having a ringed base, cylindrical sides, topped with a conical-shaped lid and a lid handle at its apex shaped like an “aviary” head, with the lid portraying an incised pattern traced with red pigment of curled-around wings. The piece is identified as Traditional Blackware from the Mayan Early Classic Period, dating between 250 and 450 A.D., and was found in Guatemala not far from the ruins of Tikal.

The chief problem is that the “bird” handle has large eyes, a wide notched beak and a prominent pointed crest rising up from the back of its cranium. And if the curled wings etched into the lid surface were fully unfurled, the wingspan of this creature would be far greater than any comparable living bird. However, the head configuration and wingspan dimensions are just right for a Pterosaur, a winged saurian from the Cretaceous.

A very similar Classical Maya earthware sample—also with a ring-base, cylindrical sides and conical lid—likewise has a “bird” head for a handle, and is on display in the Popul Vuh Museum in Guatemala. The head has large eyes, sports a long beak and has a crest on its head. The museum display labels it as a “heron,” even though no living heron has such eyes or the spike-shaped crest. Again, these are the distinctive features of a Pterosaur.

Still more images of Pteronodons, Pterosaurs and related species of flying saurians found their way into the religious art brought to light at various other Mayan and Precolumbian sites. In the Sculpture Museum situated in ancient Copan, the southernmost of the Classical Mayan cities, is a beautiful white stone piece portraying a Mayan priest wearing an unusual headdress. At its top is prominently shown a very odd-looking “bird” having a small head with a crest and a long beak, with a knobby bulge in its center, and holding a fish in its mouth. A side-by-side comparison with the skull of an extinct Pterosaur reveals striking similarities.

A cylindrical funerary vessel found in Tomb #6 in the Mayan city of Dzibanche, dating between 200 and 650 A.D., has the outline of a large bird-like creature with a long tail and wings, large eyes and a hind-skull crest shaped like a prong. The distinguishing feature here, however, is that its long beak has a pronounced snout crest at its very end, which would classify it as a member of a related species to the Pterosaur known as an Ornithecheirid. The earliest example of this species was not unearthed until 1859.

In the beautiful Mayan religious center at Palenque, a terracotta figure was found portraying a seated priest wearing what has been described as a “bird” mask, except this aviary depiction is rather unique. The face has very large oval-shaped eyes, the beak is long and pointed downward at its end, featuring a small crest halfway down its snout, and at the top of its head is a fan-like “dome” rising high about the skull. No known bird in the Yucatan rainforest—not even the well-recognized sacred quetzal—had such an anatomical configuration. Yet when we look at modern reconstructions of the Pterosaurs, particularly of the family Tapejara, every feature seen on the Mayan mask is present—the peculiar oval eyes, the beak with crest, and the distinguishing three-foot tall “dome” of keratinous material that formed the fan-like crown on top of the head. Yet the closest known fossils of the Tapejaras are in Brazil and southern England.

Farther to the south, in Panama, the area of Cocle was the home of a series of cultures called La Mula, Tonosi and Cubita, covering a period from 150 B.C.E. to 700 A.D. These peoples specialized in making gold artifacts, some of which depict an out-of-place bestiary. At the site of Sitio Conte, now designated as part of the Gran Cocle Culture Area, one of the unearthed gold pieces consists of a double image of two warrior-priests wearing “bird” masks, in much the same fashion as their Mayan cousins did in the Yucatan. Once more, we see the tell-tale large oval eyes and the long beak of the Tapejara. The one notable difference is that the Cocle portrait does not have the fan-like crown as in the Palenque mask, but rather the two sets of heads each sport a long bony extension that protrudes a good distance farther beyond the back of the cranium. It just so happens that only one species of Tapejara, designated as T. imperator, had precisely this kind of bony crest. The Cocle figures and the fossil skulls of this particular species are almost mirror images of each other.

Many tombs found among the remains of the Jalisco Culture—dating from 300 B.C.E. to 300 A.D. and located along the Pacific coast west of Mexico City—contain terracotta figurines of a ceremonial religious nature, featuring portraits of both people and animals. One such figurine, now on display in the Logan Museum in Wisconsin, shows an odd creature that is shaped something like a turtle, except this one has large stocky legs, and its body and small head are covered with spiky studs and bumps from one end to the other over its top surface. The museum display has it labeled as a “horned toad,” but the leg configuration and the shape of the head are all wrong. Its attitude and its bumpy body, however, are an excellent representation of an Ankylosuarus, a heavily armored dinosaur that was as large as a modern sedan car and weighed an estimated three tons. Its first remains were not excavated until 1902, and date back to 70 million years.

Affiliated with Mexico City’s Anthropological Museum is the House of Music which exhibits a large collection of ancient Mesoamerican instruments. One such display is the remains of an Aztec drum called a teponaz, modern forms of which are still utilized as an accompaniment for Mexican folklorica dancers. Usually around the outer circumference of this type of drum were portrayed different animal heads representing spiritual forces being summoned to take part in the ceremonies for which the drum was being rhythmically sounded.

In this particular case, the ancient Aztec percussion instrument has several stone sculpted figures around its base of a large-headed, large-eyed, wide-snouted beast, having a teeth-filled gaping mouth, and rather fierce-looking countenance that bears a resemblance to nothing else but a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Visitors and tourists are often startled by the appearance of these stone monsters, because their shape and demeanor are almost as if they were straight out of such old classic movies as Dinosaurus, Valley of the Gwangi, and the Jurassic Park series. Yet these drum sculptures are over seven hundred years old, made long before the first fossilized T-Rex skeletons were unearthed and accurately reconstructed.

South America—

An ancient clay-cast ornament from the Moche culture, once located on the northern coast of Peru and dating between 100 and 300 A.D., looks at first glance to be the figure of a baby bat, having large prominently displayed outstretched leathery wings. But on closer inspection, several oddities to this interpretation emerge. First, it has rather big eyes, while those of a bat are usually tiny in size. Its head is also bigger in proportion to its body, even for a newborn bat. And it does not have a bat’s snout with oversized nostrils, but rather a beak, much like a bird, yet with large teeth very much evident. Yet it is not a bird, because no aviary species has leathery wings with claw appendages extending out from the top of its wings. In addition, there is the hint of a bony crest located on top of its head and extending down its beak. No bat has such an appendage and neither do any modern birds.

Finally, the clincher is that this figure is shown emerging out of a broken eggshell—bats, in contrast, are mammals and are not born out of eggs.

So what is this creature? All the features portrayed would classify it as being a species of Pterosaur, most likely a Pteranodon because of the bony sail-looking crest on its head, which such prehistoric flying saurians used like a rudder when aloft. Yet this beast was supposed to have become extinct 65 million years ago.

We know from archaeological excavations carried out among Moche cultural remains that the Mochican priesthood used several forms of hallucinogenic plants in their religious ceremonies. Their colorful pottery designs and weavings were full of serpentine dragon and flying dragon motifs. Did the Mochican priestly artisans once tap into a collective memory from a distant age that once brought the Pteranodon back to life within their psychic mind’s eye?

The Bahia coastal peoples of Ecuador specialized in crafting pottery vessels having one or two chambers with spouts, that when blown across the aperture like a pipe created unusual high-pitched sound patterns. Those modern researchers who have successfully replicated these vessels and are presently experimenting with them, have demonstrated that the sounds they produce can induce altered states of consciousness. Perhaps it should not be surprising then that, on one of the Bahia whistling vessels, are portrayed two iguana-like creatures wearing head crests, with their bodies having dorsal crests and a bumpy green-colored skin surface. Yet these do not correspond to any known species of Andean iguana. Instead, they look more like duck-billed Hadrosaurs that once lived in an era far removed from ancient Ecuador. Do the sounds made by the whistling vessels invoke the visionary memories of these bygone life forms?

Another example of a recognizeable dinosaur was fashioned as part of a ceramic cup found near the ruins of Tiawanaku in Bolivia, dating between 500 and 700 A.D. It is presently part of the Werner Forman Archive collection housed in the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Berlin. On the rim of the cup appears both a creature’s flat tail on one end and its large short-pointy beaked head on the other. Most peculiar is that the head is surrounded by a collar or shield. The figurine is said to represent a parrot—but no known parrot has a neck tuft or crown of this type. However, the beaked face and the head shield without horns is very reminiscent of the countenance of the saurian Ceratops family, particularly the non-horned variety called Montanoceratops.

Still other examples of the horned variety of the Cerotops appear among the sculptures and ceramic portraits created by the coastal Peruvian Moche, Chimu, and Sican cultures.

Among the Chimu cultural remains discovered in their capital city of Chan Chan—which thrived between 1100 and 1400 A.D.—archaeologists unearthed hundreds of colorful ceramic pottery pieces showing both animals and people in everyday interaction. What puzzled the discoverers, however, is that the fauna depicted was unlike anything that lived past or present either in the Andean highlands, the altiplano country, the coastal waters or even in the neighboring Amazon rainforest on the other side of the mountains. One blackware pottery exhibits a man in priestly dress holding the the paws of a creature with a long, flat-topped cranium, and short flat snout that, when compared directly with the profile of a reconstructed Maiasaur, is almost a perfect reflection of each other. More Chimu pottery figurines portray accurate images of Iguanodons, Mapusaurs and Tyrranosaurs.

The Pacific Region—

All across the Pacific expanse—from the Maori mystics of New Zealand and the Kahuna-priests of Hawaii, to the shamans and witch-doctors of New Guinea, Papua and the East Indies—the image of the dragon was held in great reverence, and was displayed in heiaus and ahus—the many places of sacredness and healing. And once again we find that dragons were interlinked with the deeptest visions brought about by either the most profound levels of ecstatic contemplation and meditation, or induced through specific combinations of tropical plant brews. This was done, as the Polynesians and others revealed, to bring about an awakened communications with the tekoteko or aku-aku—the ancestral spirits of former peoples who once inhabited great lands and continents where today there are now only islands which the living inhabit.

In 1925, the famed auction house, Sotheby’s of London, sold a most unusual Maori artifact to the James Hooper Collection of Manchester. The Sotheby catalogue described the piece in this manner:

“A superb Maori ceremonial adze, carved from a single piece of (rimu) wood with fine opaque jad greenstone (paunamu) insert in the wood and bound with overlapping fibers, the head-butt pierced through with a square hole and carved In an openwork tiki with face highlighted by fine scrollwork and inserted with halotin (apua) shell eyes beneath a cylindrical shaft with a lizard relief. This adze was more than likely carved in the late eighteenth or early nineteenh century in the North Auckland or Taranaki style. The image of the lizard for the Maori people is one of the most powerful symbols, representing both life and death. It was feared and shunned because of its powers.”

The major problem is, this piece’s jade snout, large eyes and bulbous head with a pronounced topknot, all extending out from a very long neck, is not indicative of any known lizard or amphibian found in New Zealand. What it does bear an uncanny resemblance to are the very same features seen on the extinct Brachiosaur.

Another similar image shows up as part of the artistic impressions of the Bahau or Modang Dayak Culture of eastern Borneo, dated to the 1800’s. It too, like the Maori object, is a carved wooden adze handle in the shape of an aso, which supposedly was a mythic creature that was a combination of a dragon and a dog. But the figure’s very long neck, large open mouth with small teeth, its large eyes and a prominent topkknot on the head situated slightly forward of the eyes, matches point for point the known characteristics of a Brachiosaur skull.

The difficulty here is that there are no known local deposits of Brachiosaur fossils, the crown of which could have potentially served as a model for Borneo’s artists. This instead had to have been a beast that was seen only in vision.

There are numerous other examples found in the sculptures, wood paintings and weaving artwork from Kalimantan, Borneo, Bali, Sumatra and Java which depict very specific dinosuar species,. These include: a wooden “funerary bird” sculpted by the Dayaks of Borneo that has all the features of a Pteronodon; Kalimantan embroidered figures of giant-winged Pterosaurs and serpent-headed Elasmosaurs, now kept in the Rijkesmuseum in Amsterdam; a wooden sculpture from Sumatra showing men riding on the back of a duck-billed, fan-crested Hadrosaur of the species Parasaurolophus; and Javanese wood paintings depicting warriors fighting with a high-domed crested Corythosaurs.

Australia—

Among the many Aboriginal tribes who inhabit the Australian outback country are many traditions preserved about giant serpentine dragons which are said to have wound their way through the desolate terrain for many ages. Tribal shaman leaders claim their First Ancestors still communicate with them through such creatures, and that receiving messages about their great exploits in the far distant past is part of what they call the Dreamtime experience.

As one example, the Aboriginals of Arnhem Land, situated in the extreme northern territory of the continent, speak of large reptilian monsters called Burrunjors which, when described in detail, sound very much like a T-Rex or Allosaurus. The tribes of the territory of Victoria describe the exact same type of species, calling it the Kooleen. There are Native reports that large treasure troves of fossils of prehistoric Burrunjors and other saurians exist in nearly inaccessible regions, which modern paleontologists have yet to locate and study.

What is fascinating is that there have also been numerous sightings in the vast stretches of the outback scrub country—made over the past five decades by both Aboriginals and Australians of European ancestry—of actual dinosaur creatures. They are described being large, lizard-like, walk upright on two legs, make loud grunting sounds, leave three-pronged tracks behind, and feed off local ranch cattle. Yet they are very elusive, appearing and disappearing in an instant, with their tracks often beginning and ending in the middle of a dried river bed, as if dropping out of thin air and then vanishing into nothing.

When asked about such enigmatic occurrences, all the Native Australian shamans can say is that, when the “magic powers are strong which flow through the dream paths” which criss-cross the “enchanted landscape of the walkabout country,” then the Burrunjor and other saurian animals momentarily “fall out of the Dreamtime.” They temporarily manifest into our physical reality, before they finally “return through the billabong of light” and back into the “dream-memories” of the distant past.

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]