The Great Zoo of China (8 page)

The audience gasped.

‘Whoa, mama,’ Aaron Perry said aloud.

The red-faced dragon spat out the bicycle and stomped back to its place, its forked tail slinking behind it.

But all CJ could think about was the yellow remote that had prompted the creature into action. Trained animals reacted to stimuli: rewards and treats or, in the less enlightened places of the world, pain. She wondered what kind of stimulus that remote triggered and suspected that the answer was pain.

Yim bowed. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I will hand you back to the deputy director now.’

Zhang stepped forward. ‘Let me ask you this:
what precisely is a dragon?
Myths of gigantic winged serpents have existed for thousands of years. As with many other things, they originally appeared in China. The first Chinese dragon myth dates back to the year 4700 BC, to a statue of a dragon attributed to the Yangshao culture of that time.’

On the plasma screen behind him, a timeline appeared. The words
4700 BC CHINA
popped up at the left-hand end of it.

‘The Babylonian king, Gilgamesh, fought a fierce dragon named Humbaba in the epic tale that bears his name. He lived around 2700 BC.’

2700 BC BABYLON/PERSIA
appeared on the timeline.

‘The ancient Greeks spoke of Hercules fighting a dragon in order to steal the apples of the Hesperides, the eleventh of his twelve labours. Hercules is generally thought to have lived around the year 1250 BC.’

1250 BC GREECE
popped up on the timeline.

‘From about 100 BC and for the next 1500 years, several Meso-American cultures including the Aztecs and the Mayans venerated a flying serpent named Quetzalcoatl.

‘And, of course, the United Kingdom has long lauded the bravery of St George who slayed a dragon not in England but in Libya around the year 300 AD.

‘In the eighth century, the Scandinavians wrote of Beowulf fighting a fire-breathing dragon and in the thirteenth century, the Vikings sang of Fafnir.’

At each mention of a historical period, the appropriate date sprang up on the timeline on the plasma screen, until it looked like this:

Hu took over. ‘There is something very curious, however, about all of these mythologies. In every single one of these myths found across the ancient world,
the dragons are the same
. Their features are consistent
around the globe
.

‘Mythical dragons are almost universally large hexapods with four walking limbs and two wings.’

At that moment, all five of the dragons on the stage opened their wings while remaining standing on their four legs.

Yim rewarded them with more treats.

At which point, CJ glimpsed another detail that caused her some concern.

While the yellowjacket accepted her treat happily, one of the four red-bellied black dragons took its treat with what could only be described as a long, lingering glare at its handler. Its tail began to twitch, a bit like an alligator did when it—

Entirely ignorant of this, Hu went on: ‘Dragons of lore were serpentine creatures with scaly reptilian skin.’

The yellowjacket turned on the spot, showing off its leathery hide like a model doing a turn at a fashion show.

The others laughed. CJ didn’t. The dragon, she saw, got another treat.

Hu added, ‘And, of course, most famously, some dragons . . .’ he paused dramatically, ‘ . . . breathed fire . . .’

The five dragons suddenly opened their jaws wide, crouched low and aimed their open mouths at the audience.

Seymour Wolfe sat bolt upright. Aaron Perry gripped his seat. Hamish tensed. Ambassador Syme made to shield his eyes with his forearm. His aide, Johnson, half sprang to his feet.

CJ was already out of her chair by the time the dragons had opened their mouths. She had seen their body language change—seen them crouch and lower their heads—and had immediately dived clear, her reflexes honed from years of working with crocs. She was on the stairs and out of the line of fire and about to sprint away when the laughing started.

She looked up.

Hu and Zhang were chuckling.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Hu said. ‘Alas, the ability of a dragon to breathe fire
is
the stuff of legend. None of the animals at the Great Dragon Zoo of China is able to breathe fire.’

The audience visibly relaxed, smiled nervously at each other. CJ resumed her seat, nonplussed. The dragons got more treats.

Zhang continued. ‘But the question remains: how could this happen? How could the fundamental characteristics of this mythical creature be so consistent across an ancient world without mass communication or intercontinental travel? The answer is obvious:
there were dragons everywhere around the world
. And they became the stuff of myth and legend because they only appeared irregularly.’

Wolfe threw up his hand. ‘What do you mean by that? Irregularly?’

‘I am glad you asked,’ Zhang said, ‘because this brings us back to our original question: what precisely is a dragon? The answer is actually quite simple. The animal we know as a dragon is a dinosaur, a most unique kind of dinosaur that survived the meteor impact that condemned the rest of its species to extinction.’

C
J leaned forward, intrigued.

Zhang explained. ‘After much study by palaeontologists from the Universities of Shanghai and Beijing, it has been determined that our “dragons” are part of a hitherto unknown line of dinosaurs belonging to the family or “clade” of creatures known as
archosauria
.

‘The archosaurs ruled the Earth after the Permian-Triassic extinction event, a mass extinction event that occurred 250 million years ago, not unlike the famous Alvarez Meteor that struck the Earth 65 million years ago causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Archosaurs were the dominant land animals during the Triassic Age and they are the ancient ancestors of crocodilians and, importantly, the branch of flying reptiles known as pterosaurs.’

‘Ah, pterosaurs,’ Wolfe said, getting it. Beside him, Ambassador Syme nodded, too.

CJ cocked her head. It probably wasn’t quite as simple as that, but she could see what the Chinese were doing. Convincing someone to believe something that was inherently unbelievable often meant getting that person to make a quick and easy comparison to something they already knew. By linking dragons to a dinosaur with similar features—the pterodactyl—the Chinese could get the paying public to accept their logic quickly and readily. They had just done exactly that with Wolfe and the US Ambassador.

But as a herpetologist, CJ knew that the pterodactyl’s lineage was famously uncertain: it was neither a dinosaur nor a bird. It didn’t fit at all into the so-called ‘Great Tree of Life’. It was the same with the archosaurs—they were a catch-all category for any ancient creature whose origins couldn’t be easily explained.

Zhang said, ‘Scientists here at the Great Dragon Zoo believe that our dragons—our archosaurs—survived the Alvarez Meteor 65 million years ago by hibernating deep beneath the surface of the Earth underneath dense nickel and zinc deposits. Their hibernation techniques are very advanced and really rather fascinating; they also explain the consistent worldwide myth of the dragon.’

‘How so?’ CJ asked.

‘Many animals hibernate,’ Zhang said, ‘although usually the term
hibernate
is limited to warm-blooded creatures. For reptiles, the technical term is brumate, and fish experience what is called dormancy, but for now, for simplicity’s sake, let us just use the term hibernate for all animals. Rodents and bears do it, so do alligators and snakes. As a general rule, hibernation involves a creature slowing down its metabolism to an incredibly low level, sometimes only a single heartbeat per minute. The animal gorges itself before entering hibernation and slowly, over a long period of time, its body consumes that fuel.

‘Mammalian hibernation usually occurs over the winter—rodents will hibernate for up to six months until the next feeding season. Classic rodent hibernation also involves a decrease in body temperature. Bears, on the other hand, employ a special variety of hibernation called torpor that involves the remarkable recycling of both urine and proteins.

‘Reptiles exhibit other qualities in their hibernatory states: when it gets very cold, an alligator can float to the surface of a pond, allowing its nostrils to sit above the waterline; as the water freezes, the alligator will be frozen
into
the very surface of the pond yet it is still able to breathe. Alligators can slow their heart rates down to unbelievably low levels, far lower than any mammal. When the ice melts, the gator simply swims away.’

This was true, CJ thought. The remarkable abilities of members of the animal kingdom never failed to impress her. Indeed, it was one of the reasons she enjoyed being a vet.

Zhang continued: ‘And then there are the “group hibernators”, like dormice. These animals hibernate in packs and have a rather unusual waking routine: they select one of their number to emerge from the den and see if the season has changed. If it has, the lead animal wakes the others and they emerge. If it has not, the lead animal returns to the den and resumes its slumber.

‘Our archosaurs here at the Great Dragon Zoo of China exhibit many of these hibernation techniques but their genius is they exhibit them on an incredible timescale.

‘First, our archosaurs are warm-blooded, not cold-blooded, so while they may look like reptiles, they are not. They exist somewhere in between mammals and reptiles, so they exhibit the capabilities of both when it comes to hibernation.

‘They also have one other advantage: their hibernation is done in an egg state. Since the animal is not yet fully formed but rather is still in a foetal state in albumenic fluids it is capable of considerably longer hibernatory periods.

‘Our animals went into hibernation a long, long time ago, at a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and when the Earth was much, much warmer. And like the dormouse, they have been periodically sending forth one of their number ever since that epoch: a lone egg will hatch and a young dragon will emerge to check if the climate has warmed enough for the rest of their group to emerge.

‘Let me direct you to our timeline from before.’ Zhang indicated the plasma screen. ‘Now let’s overlay the average ambient land temperature from each era to that timeline.’

A wavy red line appeared below the timeline.

CJ saw the match instantly. ‘I’ll be damned,’ she said.

Zhang said, ‘The appearance of dragons in human mythology
perfectly
matches every rise in average land temperature on this planet, from the rise in temperature that occurred around the building of the pyramids in 2700 BC to the Medieval Warm Period.

‘Why does the dragon legend persist around the world so consistently? Because all around the world, for thousands of years,
lone dragons
have been emerging from hibernation to test the atmosphere, checking on behalf of their clans to see if the ambient temperature has risen enough and the time to emerge has arrived.

‘Myths arise from actual events, remarkable events that get talked about precisely because they are remarkable and which then get embellished in the retelling. This does not change the fact that the original event actually happened. We believe that all of those ancient dragon myths, from Gilgamesh to Hercules to Beowulf, have their genesis in real events, real events that occurred at times when the Earth was warmer.