The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard
of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those
hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the
Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils
exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these
stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of
gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about
their deaths? Did they collect fossils? Beginning in the East, with
its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived
and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book
examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for
medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native
Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct
creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone.
In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of
extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as
Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters.
Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern
scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many
centuries. Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional
accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes
us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the
Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends
of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our
understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before
evolutionary theory developed.
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