Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Delivered Daily
Daily Newsletter
Sign up for the latest discoveries, groundbreaking research and fascinating breakthroughs that impact you and the wider world direct to your inbox.
Once a week
Life's Little Mysteries
Feed your curiosity with an exclusive mystery every week, solved with science and delivered direct to your inbox before it's seen anywhere else.
Once a week
How It Works
Sign up to our free science & technology newsletter for your weekly fix of fascinating articles, quick quizzes, amazing images, and more
Delivered daily
Space.com Newsletter
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Once a month
Watch This Space
Sign up to our monthly entertainment newsletter to keep up with all our coverage of the latest sci-fi and space movies, tv shows, games and books.
Once a week
Night Sky This Week
Discover this week's must-see night sky events, moon phases, and stunning astrophotos. Sign up for our skywatching newsletter and explore the universe with us!
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
In the competitive world of mythical creatures, where mermaids can be in vogue one moment, disgruntled green ogres the next, dragons possess that quality known in business and Hollywood as "staying power."
Vote for Your Favorite Wildest Dragons of All Time
Harpies, griffins, unicorns, mermaids, centaurs and sea serpents make occasional cameo appearance in books or films. But they are, generally speaking, most appealing when happened upon in myths and legends.
A sphinx in the 21st Century seems anachronistic and out of place, but dragons somehow never lose their appeal.
Hatched originally from the collective imaginations of ancient cultures, dragons have found ways to persist and thrive into modern times. Nowadays, they can be found everywhere: books, television, film, tattoos.
It used to be that dragons were worshipped, revered and feared, as benevolent deities, temperamental forces of nature or harbingers of doom, but now they are (for the most part anyway) merely popular and fashionable. A few have managed to weather the centuries relatively unscathed and to preserve their reputations as wild and unpredictable, while others, tamed and rendered children-friendly, are wild in a way that is more extravagant and flamboyant than fearsome.
See how many of our Wildest Dragons you recognize, and vote for your favorite. Interested in why dragons became so embedded in culture? Check out Top 10 Beasts and Dragons: How Reality Made Myth.
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
