Basilisks have been known for looong time. The way it's born and it looks has had many versions, it has been killed by Alexander the Great himself, it has been named The King of Serpents and it has been popularized by JK Rowling's book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but... it has never been mentioned in an actual Greek myth.
It's always the dragons who appear instead of them. Probably because the first time they're described is by a 1st century Anno Domine Roman author. I couldn't find any Greek references to it because they're lost or yet to be discovered, and I could only find Pliny the Elder's Basilisk of Cyrene and stuff from Medieval times. It has no ancient representations either, unlike other mythical creatures like Hippalectryon, Pegasus or Medusa.
It's not a mythological creature, it's rather a legendary one. But it was somehow still classified as a Greek mythological creature, to the point it appears in The Theoi Project.
But you wanna hear a crazy theory about them?
My theory is that basilisks are the dinosaurs of Greco-Roman mythology. One would think that's the dragons, but they're not.
This is because the closest relatives to dinosaurs are chickens. And what do basilisks come from? Well, they're born when a rooster lays an egg (which is perfectly possible in real life, as hens can change sex to have some rooster-like features like the tail or the crowing and still lay eggs. Basically, temporary trans roosters), and this egg is nursed by a snake. (There are many versions of how a basilisk is born, but we'll stick to this one.)
A bird and a reptilian; the two ways a dinosaur can be described. A basilisk is both. Furthermore, in Greek mythology, the first rooster was created by Ares when punishing a guy named Alectryon (who's myth I won't explain right now. Just search it on Google, it's pretty short) and Ares' sacred animal is a snake, precisely. It wouldn't be strange... you bet there was a snake near Alectryon at some point.
It's also known that the ancients could have found dinosaur bones and thought it was from some mystical creature, probably a dragon, but that is just a theory to see where the dragons come from, since they are something nearly all cultures share. What if they thought it was a basilisk instead? After all, drakon just means snake, and that's what the basilisk literally is (in some versions), an overgrown snake. And dragons are also overgrown snakes too, but... eh. Let's leave it like this.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments. I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this.
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