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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > History of science
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The First Fossil Hunters - Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Paperback)
Loot Price: R434
Discovery Miles 4 340
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The First Fossil Hunters - Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Paperback)
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Loot Price R434
Discovery Miles 4 340
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths,
and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular
creatures of classical mythology Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and
Giants—these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue
to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that
have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what
if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous
creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their
legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that
Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through
careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly
shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis
in fact—in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were
once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor
shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed
of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently
encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they
developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence,
concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of
the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first
told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert
at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of
Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground. Like
their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and
measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples
and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these
prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought
to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and
Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid
paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for
the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries,
Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.
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