"Howard also explained why it had taken so long for dragons to appear in an Elder Scrolls game. He said that dragons had become something of a cliché in fantasy games, and it was something that Bethesda had decided not to do them just for the sake of it. He said that the studio had decided that Skyrim was the right game, and the right setting, for dragons to make their Elder Scrolls debut, but that it wanted to handle them like a Jurassic Park game might handle dinosaurs."
There was a dragon in Redguard, which came out in 1998, so Skyrim isn't their debut. You'd think Todd Howard would know about his own company's games.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:RG_dragon.jpg