Dragon is a specific product of sacrificial culture. The ancient book says, "Water is a dragon." It can be seen that the dragon was created as the main water god (the legendary dragon king), and there is no sufficient basis for the statement that the dragon is related to totem worship in ancient clan society. Since written records, all clans in ancient China have taken China's surname as a symbol, and there is no record of using animal figures as symbols. Ancient humans had low abstract thinking ability and could not think logically. They can only understand things through analogy and reproduction. It is difficult for ancient ancestors to create a virtual animal image that combines various animal characteristics. Therefore, dragons are not virtual animals. In Er Ya Yi, the dragon has "nine elephants" (horns like deer, neck like snake, claws like eagle ...), which means that the local shape of the dragon is similar to some animals, but it does not mean that the dragon is composed of the characteristics of nine animals. Even the worship symbols of ancient foreign nations are images of real animals (eagles, tigers, etc.). ) or the combination of man and beast (Sphinx).
It is natural that dragons appear with other real animals in the zodiac, because before Xia and Shang Dynasties, the dragons referred to by the ancients were real Chinese alligators, and crocodiles were one of the animals that people all over the world paid close attention to and worshipped.