Will Nessie grace our 'dragon days' of summer?

It must be the heat: August is Dragon Awareness Month.

Yes, dragons: Those massive, winged, fire-breathing, dinosaur-looking creatures that pervade human folklore across time and continents.

Mythical, or real?

Bestselling author Carl Sagan was a believer, in a way.

“The pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of many cultures is probably no accident,” wrote Sagan in “The Dragons of Eden.”

Pointing to prehistoric man’s experiences with real flying dinosaurs, such as pterodactyls, he called it fossil memory: A genetic imprint of real experiences from earlier millennia, passed down as innate knowledge and sprinkled with imagination.

Sagan wasn’t the only scientist to play loose with dragons. Old editions of Encyclopedia Britannica described certain dinosaurs as “dragon-like.” Some paleontologists used the words dragon and dinosaur interchangeably. Archaeologists have uncovered dragon-shaped skulls and other bones supporting that image.

Despite the decline of dinosaurs in Earth’s history, surviving flying reptiles such as pterosaurs long provided fodder for fear and fascination. Embellish them with a few spikes (think modern bearded dragons and iguanas, whose ancestors were perhaps a little larger), toss in a little fire-breath and voila, dragon legend takes root.

Dragons make consistent appearances throughout literature as early as 2,000 B.C.E. in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Dragons are common in stories from Beowulf to Harry Potter, bolstered by alleged real-life accounts.

The Bible’s Daniel killed a dragon. Alexander the Great claimed one hissed at him in a cave. Greek historian Heroditus described “griffins” guarding their eggs, and other Greek accounts claim that dragons were imported to Greece from Ethiopia.

Second century accounts describe Roman consul Regulus and his soldiers killing a dragon during battle with Carthage. They sent its hide to the Roman senate, where it was measured at 120 feet.

Then of course there are the more modern and recognizable volumes of creatively depicted dragons in cultures of the Far East, where dragons are still considered sacred. Explorer Marco Polo described huge serpents with small legs in China, with jaws wide enough to swallow a man. Ancient Chinese books describe healers who used dragon blood to cure the sick.

Stories from ancient Egypt and other African and Arab cultures describe mostly the flying variety. Scandinavian accounts describe sea-dragons as late as the 18th century.

Even now, some people seriously claim the sea-monster (or maybe her great-great-grandmonster) swims today in Scotland’s Loch Ness.

This writer aims to check it out next week, “live on location.”

True or false, real or imagined, feared or enamored — dragons are here to stay.

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. If you believe, she might share a fuzzy Nessie photo at Sholeh@cdapress.com.