Friendly reminder that there's an ancient Egyptian "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor", in which a guy gets stranded in an island & meets a giant dragon/serpent-like creature that tells him there used to be more like him, but they all burned to death when a star fell from the sky!

The serpent is said to have been 30 cubits long (which I believe equals to about 15 m), with a "beard" over 2 cubits, and eyebrows of lapislazuli, as well as skin inlaid with gold. It was so big it would splinter trees and make the earth shake as it moved through the island!

This makes the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor the earliest story to feature a lost island with giant reptilian inhabitants. The serpent/dragon also threatens to burn him to death if he does not state his business, so it could also be the first tale with a fire-breathing dragon.

The story dates back to the Middle Kingdom and may have been inspired by a real extraterrestrial impact that took place less than 5.000 years ago; two possible events have been proposed to explain it, with one of them confirmed by a crater in SW Egypt, the Kamil Crater:

Naturally this couldn´t be the strike that wiped out the dinos, but it's still uncanny that the Egyptians had the concept of a population of giant reptiles wiped out by extraterrestrial impact. Sadly, the story states that the island sunk into the sea after the sailor's visit u-u

(Photo of the crater by Mario Di Martino)