From Many Imaginations, One Fearsome Creature

A huge scaly serpent, usually with the wings of a bat or bird. Four or two or no legs. Breathes fire or poisonous fumes. May talk, but won't take guff from mere mortals. Sometimes has a vulnerable underbelly (good luck, Siegfried!) and sometimes is solid armor plate. May guard a treasure. May diet on virgins, or anything that crosses its path, halitosis-barbecued.

Sound familiar? Of course. For everyone from Perseus of Jaffa to Harry of Hogwarts, it's a dragon.

Of all the hoary old monsters, dragons are the most persistent, appearing everywhere from mall crystal shops to Disney movies. Cryptozoologists search for its cousins, the Loch Ness monster and the mokele-mbembe of the Congo swamps.

Dragon images have been found on the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, on scrolls from China, in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Ethiopian sketches, on the prows of Viking ships, in bas relief on Aztec temples, on cliffs above the Mississippi River and even on bones carved by Inuits in climates where no reptile could live.

Now scholars drawing on primitive art, fossilized bones and ancient legends are struggling to explain how cultures that had no contact with one another constructed mythical creatures so remarkably similar. And why did dragons persist so long?

Claw-footed griffins, gentle unicorns and man-eating sphinxes passed into legend relatively quickly, while even educated men clung to belief in dragons at least through 1734, wrote Peter J. Hogarth, author of ''Dragons'' (Viking, 1979). That year, the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus dismissed a seven-headed hydra on display in Hamburg by saying it was a clever fake concocted of animal parts. Its aggrieved owners, merchants who had bought it from Count von Leeuwenhaupt for the ''staggering price of 10,000 florins,'' drove Linnaeus out of town by threatening to sue, thus puffing a small dark cloud across the dawn of rationalism.

''The new zoology had lost a first skirmish with the old,'' Mr. Hogarth wrote. But, he concluded, it won every later one.