My Picture - Dragon man

Extracted from Wikipedia:

The dragon is a mythical creature of which some interpretation or depiction appears in almost every culture worldwide. The physical description and supposed abilities of the creature vary immensely according to the different cultures in which it appears. However, the unifying feature of almost all interpretations is it being a serpentine or otherwise reptilian monster (or at least possessing a serpentine/reptilian part or trait), and often possessing magical or spiritual qualities.

The two most familiar interpretations of dragons are either European dragons, derived from various European folk traditions, or unrelated Oriental dragons, derived from the Chinese dragon (lóng).

Chinese dragons (simplified Chinese: 龙; traditional Chinese: 龍; pinyin: lóng), and Oriental dragons generally, are usually seen as benevolent, whereas European dragons are usually malevolent though there are exceptions (one exception being Y Ddraig Goch, The Red Dragon of Wales). Malevolent dragons also occur in the mythology of Persia (see Azhi Dahaka) and Russia, among other places.

Dragons are particularly popular in China and the 5-clawed dragon was a symbol of the Chinese emperors, with the phoenix or fenghuang the symbol of the Chinese empress. Dragon costumes manipulated by several people are a common sight at Chinese festivals.

Dragons may be mental representations of natural human fears of snakes, wildcats, birds of prey, as well as teeth, claws, size, and even venom blending with fear of wildfire. Others believe that the dragon may have had a real counterpart from which the various legends arose — typically dinosaurs or other archosaurs are mentioned as a possibility — but there is no physical evidence to support this claim, only alleged sightings collected by cryptozoologists. Loren Coleman argues that monitor lizards were the basis of some dragon tales and that the breath of the dragon is the fantastic imagery of the steam from the warm Montane Valley monitors emerging from a body of water into the cold air of some Asian locations.

Dinosaur and mammalian fossils were occasionally mistaken for the bones of dragons and other mythological creatures — for example, a discovery in 300 BC in Wucheng, Sichuan, China, was labeled as such by Chang Qu.