Why we love to fear dragons  March 30, 2012 at 10:54 PM ET  A
freshly hatched dragon perches on the shoulder of Daenerys in
"Game of Thrones."  This the Year of the Dragon, and not just
because of the Chinese calendar: Dragons play big roles in HBO's
"Game of Thrones" TV series as well as the upcoming film version
of "The Hobbit." Those fire-breathing, leathery-winged reptiles
have been gripping the human imagination with their sharp talons
for millennia, and it's worth wondering why.  Some folklorists
trace the dragon myth back to a variety of sources in ancient
China, Rome, Greece and India, and speculate that it had its
genesis in the discovery of fossil bones from the strange
creatures we now know as dinosaurs:    • Scythian lore described
griffins with lionlike bodies and birdlike beaks. In the year
77, Pliny the Elder passed down the Scythian stories of gold-
guarding griffins with peculiar ears and wings.   • During his
travels in northern India, the first-century Greek philosopher
Apollonius of Tyana r