This article is interesting but is basically plagiarism of The Flight of Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book) there's unfortunately no comments at ThoughtCo so I couldn't say it there, and although it isn't rntn's fault obviously not sure if it should be flagged for being plagiarism.

Makes me mad because that was a really great book and now it's sort of an ok article.

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. I was not aware of the Flight of Dragons book. Looking at the wiki page, Dickinson's "pseudo-scientific monograph" is somewhat divergent from the known biomedical science, which the Thoughtco author (who holds a PhD in the area) made a very readable, if simplistic article on.

From the included bio, Dr. Helmenstine teaches at the high school through graduate levels, and I expect this informs the level of difficulty (or rather the lack thereof) in the article.

Personally, my experience developing software for a large university financial services group gave me a lot of sympathy for the plight of non-tenure PhDs (who are often on semester non-renewable contracts with no benefits) and, while Dr. Helmenstine may have been familiar with the book you referred to, I don't think it would be appropriate for the sources cited.

I found the article to be a light but interesting look at biomedical science couched in the beginning of a multicultural treatment of the folklore of the dragon, which is why I submitted it.

On a side note, the etymology of the English "dragon" and the Sinitic "long", (the Mandarin reading as I'm not sure if HN allows CJK unicode ideographs in comments) which the author introduced by way of contrasting species of flying lizards and flying snakes (both of which occur in Asia) is an area of inquiry that I would have introduced on the Thoughtco page, if they had comments..

If anyone is interested, I would be happy to share what little background I have from my volunteer experience translating between Chinese, Japanese, and English and the graduate work I am doing now (with no hope of ever getting tenure) in Chinese Japanese English machine translation.