It appears as if Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> wrote:
|
|Good point; real dinosaur fossils are rather incomprehensible and hard
|to notice for the untrained viewer. However, we don't need to invoke
|fossils, "racial memories" (rather, old phobias) or exaggerations of
|snake - people can very well have seen or experienced crocodiles, and
|then the stories grew.
I personally know of cases where a creature hurt a young human which later developed dislike for the whole creature species. When such a human encounter a related species with larger units, the human would naturally feel a larger dislike for these units as they could damage the human more than a smaller specimen could.