“Life seems to be simply what matter does, given the right conditions and enough time. ”

I love Dr Stephen Hawking’s style. Give matter enough time in the right place and life is what it comes up with.

He adds: “I think that life is probably quite common throughout the universe, but that’s another tale altogether. As life developed it changed the planet on which it was born, altering the very fabric of the earth. After 4.5 billion years, the human race arrived on the scene”

Once upon a time, reality was not about people scuttling all over the surface of this stunning sphere, building civilisations and infrastructures and networks.

Once upon a time there were not really any people anywhere at all.

We have all goggled wonderingly at a timeline of the universe since it began. What always gets me is that of our planet’s 4.5 billion years, one-third if its time was spent getting to a point where our plants could create energy from the sun. Scientists estimate photosynthesis arrived later at the feast of creation than I had ever realised.

We have had three billion years to get used to that natural boon. Two of those were taken getting our multicellular act together. The leap from trapping solar energy to multiplying cells took unimaginable aeons to complete. One giant leap for cellkind.

Next time you are watching that goldfish tax its one-second memory span with another turn round the bowl it is worth remembering that his forebears were here first. Fish have been around, scientists think, for around 500 million years, along with their contemporaries the first amphibians.

And the household fly’s family tree has stolen a march on us too: those beady compound eyes have been eyeing up gruesome feasts for some 400 million years.

The reptiles, the mammals, the birds, the flowers: all came first.

Dinosaurs died out – apart from those who evolved to become  birds –  about 65 million years ago. And finally, 2,5 million  years ago, the first of the species Homo set foot on the planet.

This planet belonged to someone else for 160 million years. A population with scales and cold blood and, in the most part, very big teeth.

We know them from their bones, which they have left for us as a gruesome reminder that we have arrived very late indeed in the history of this planet.

If the timeline is to be believed there were more than 60 million years between the dinosaur’s leaving the party and us knocking on the door, bottle in hand.

Since we have been here, we have been unearthing signs that those great lizards were here before us. With less hindsight than we have now, undoubtably: but across the world the folklore of man has created explanations of its own, building fantastical stories of that enchanting lizard of the skies: the dragon.

An anthropologist from Central Florida had the bright idea of studying the myths from every culture about dragons. David Jones, in his book An Instinct For Dragons, draws together an uncanny set of similarities between many of the dragon myths and legends of the world.

It seems even people who have never seen a reptile have dragons in their dreams. The Inuits, who live in a frozen waste inhospitable to anything with cold blood, have a dragon-like creature who weaves his way through their stories.

Make of that what you will: Jones hypothesises that over millions of years we have developed an instinctive fear of those that could prey on us when we were first here: snakes, and great cats, and raptors, to name a few.

He says the dragon is an amalgam of all we found terrifying, back then when man was not so very in control of this earth. And so we play its image over and over again in our story.

And look at the wealth of story we have produced!  The image of a blue dragon was emblazoned upon Agamemnon’s belt in the Iliad. Claudius Aelianus, a Roman author of an eclectic 17 books of natural history anecdotes about animals, claims a species of dragon lived in Ethiopia which could grow to a length of 180 feet and hunted elephants for dinner.

Beowulf came face to face with a dragon; the Bulgarians’ dragons represent the forces of nature on their crops – the female brings the unkind, destructive forces and the male the protective ones. There is George’s dragon, and Smaug, Tolkien’s dragon, and as many dragons, really as we have dreams.

Today dragons are still enchanting us: and a new find in the United States has reconfirmed our love-and-fear-affair with the winged serpent.

This one is 66 million years old, it seems.

Three friends stumbled upon a pile of bones during a fossil-collecting trip in South Dakota. And after a two-year reconstruction,  everyone had to admit this looked more like the mythical dragon than any other fossil found to date.

The torso bones are not so much to write home about: the creature was a plant eater, it seems, and  Times journalist Jack Malvern fancifully compares it to the weight of a mediaeval warhorse n his article about the find.

It is the head which stops one in one’s tracks. The man who got to name this new species, paleontologist Robert Bakker, told The Times: ““It carried an armour-plated head of almost magical configuration, covered with knobs and spikes, horns and crests. I was staring at the skull last summer and the name just popped into my head:  Hogwartsia.”

A 66 million year old reptile has collided, in the full glare of the world’s media, with a 21st century fantasy novel. This dinosaur will be called Dracorex Hogwartsia, in honour of JK Rowling’s fictional wizards school; because her stories reminded the paleontologist of what he saw.

Talk about full circle.