Griffins, Cyclopes, Monsters, 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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