Were Mythical Creatures Inspired by Fossils?

It is popularly believed that stories about dragons and other mythical creatures must have arisen when ancient peoples discovered fossils of prehistoric animals, especially dinosaurs. As we shall see in a moment, there is definitely some evidence that ancient peoples did sometimes discover fossils of prehistoric creatures and interpret them as the remains of mythic beasts.

Fossils, however, seem to have only rarely been the source of belief in such mythic creatures to begin with; it seems to have been far more common for people to interpret fossils in light of mythic creatures they already believed in, rather than inventing entirely new mythic beasts to explain the fossils.

Furthermore, the vast majority of claims about specific mythical creatures being inspired by specific prehistoric creatures don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. There is almost no solid evidence to support the assumption that dragons, Cyclopes, or griffins were inspired by prehistoric fossils and there is actually quite substantial evidence against these assumptions.

A review of the popular beliefs on this subject

The idea that stories about mythical creatures might be inspired by ancient peoples discovering fossils of prehistoric animals has been around for a long time. As I shall discuss later in this article, the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel (lived 1875 – 1946) is primarily responsible for promoting the popular but unsubstantiated notion that stories about Cyclopes arose when the ancient Greeks discovered dwarf elephant skulls and mistook the nose-hole in the center of the skull for an eye socket.

Despite having existed for a while, though, the idea of mythical creatures being inspired by fossils has been heavily promoted over the course of the past three decades by the American historian Adrienne Mayor, who is currently a research scholar at Stanford University. She first started writing on the subject in academic papers published in the early 1990s.

In 2000, Mayor published her book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times through Princeton University Press, in which she argued that many of the most famous creatures from Greek mythology may have been inspired by ancient discoveries of fossils of large vertebrate animals. In 2005, Mayor published another book titled Fossil Legends of the First Americans, in which she argued that many stories from native American cultures are directly inspired by ancient discoveries of fossils of prehistoric creatures as well.

Mayor’s claims have become wildly popular with the general public. The History Channel series History’s Mysteries—the same series that spawned the wildly popular television series Ancient Aliens—had an episode called “Ancient Monster Hunters” based on her ideas. In 2011, the BBC produced a documentary film on the subject titled Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters.

In 2014, National Geographic even published a children’s book by the author Mark Aronson titled The Griffin and the Dinosaur: How Adrienne Mayor Discovered a Fascinating Link between Myth and Science about how discoveries of Protoceratops fossils in Skythia supposedly inspired stories about griffins.

As a result of all this promotion, the public has been misled into thinking that Mayor’s speculative hypotheses are the scholarly consensus, even though most of them are far from it.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Adrienne Mayor, the scholar who is most responsible for promoting the idea that most mythical creatures are inspired by people in ancient times discovering fossils of prehistoric animals

Some good examples of this really happening

Before I say anything more, I should note that Mayor actually does point out a few decent examples of passages in ancient texts that do legitimately seem to describe ancient peoples discovering ancient fossils and mistaking them for the remains of mythic beasts.

For instance, the ancient Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 AD) writes in his Life of Augustus 72 that the emperor Augustus kept a collection of bones in his villa at Capreae that were believed to have belonged to terrifying monsters of ancient times. Here is the passage, as translated by J. C. Rolfe:

“His own villas, which were modest enough, he decorated not so much with handsome statues and pictures as with terraces, groves, and objects noteworthy for their antiquity and rarity; for example, at Capreae the monstrous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called the ‘bones of the giants,’ and the weapons of the heroes.”

Similarly, the orator Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 AD), who was a native Roman, but who wrote exclusively in Greek, records in his On the Nature of Animals 16.39 that there were bones displayed on the Greek island of Chios that purportedly belonged to a monstrous serpent that had been killed in a forest fire. He writes, as translated by A. F. Schofield:

“Now historians of Chios also assert that in that island near the mountain named Pelinnaeus in a wooded glen filled with tall trees there was a snake of gigantic size whose very hiss made the inhabitants of Chios shudder. None of the farmers, none of the herdsmen dared to approach the spot and observe its size, but they were confident simply from its hiss that the beast was a monster to strike one with consternation.”

“Now the discovery how large in fact it was, was due to a miraculous and truly wonderful contrivance. A furious and violent wind assailed the trees in the glen and they were hurled one against the other, and the boughs crashed together with such force that they generated flames, and a huge fire was kindled which embraced the entire region and encircled the monster.”

“It was cut off, and being unable to creep out was burned to death. And so when the place was stripped, all lay bare to view. And the inhabitants of Chios, freed now from their dread, came to see, and discovered the bones to be of gigantic size and the head terrifying. From these they were able to guess how large and how awful the brute was while still alive.”

Clearly, there is some evidence that, at least in some cases, ancient peoples really did discover ancient fossils and interpret them as the bones of mythic beasts. The problem I have isn’t with the idea that ancient peoples did this itself, but rather with people who claim that this is how most myths originated or who try to claim specific examples of this happening (like the Cyclops or the griffin) without any actual ancient texts talking about bones.

I should also point out that Mayor herself admits that not all ancient stories about monsters are inspired by fossils. She writes on page xix of her introduction to the 2011 edition of The First Fossil Hunters:

“Not all myths of monsters or giants are fossil-related, of course. Such tales exist in many lands that lack large vertebrate fossil remains, or whose fossils are inconspicuous to untrained eyes. For example, pterosaur fossils exist in Mexico but are not noticeable to ordinary passersby, so legends of giant raptors there cannot be associated with flying reptile remains. Scandinavia has many tales of dragons and sea monsters but has been considered barren of fossils.”

This willingness to admit that at least some ancient stories about monsters and giants are not inspired by fossils actually differentiates Mayor from some of her followers that I have encountered online—many of whom are absolutely convinced that just about every story about every mythical creature must have been inspired by ancient peoples discovering ancient fossils.

The reason why the fossil hypothesis has become such a huge pet peeve of mine is because it has become so pervasive that it seems like, whenever someone tries to talk about the origins of Greek myths, instead of talking about actual ancient sources, they just want to talk about dinosaurs. Wide-eyed speculation about fossils has come to replace actual discussion of the ancient sources.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on display in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. Dinosaurs are cool, but, when we talk about ancient mythologies, we really need to analyze the actual ancient sources—not groundlessly speculate about dinosaur fossils.

Dragons and dinosaurs

It seems to be almost universally believed that stories about dragons simply must have been originally inspired by dinosaur bones. I remember, when I was really little, I asked where stories about dragons came from and remember I was told they came from people finding dinosaur bones and mistaking them for dragons. I remember at one point going to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum where they had a display of bones from a dinosaur they called “Dracorex hogwartsia.” The display explicitly connected the bones to stories about dragons.

Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that stories about dragons were originally inspired by discoveries of dinosaur bones. The reason why most people today assume that dragons must have been inspired by dinosaurs is because modern portrayals of dragons look so much like dinosaurs. The earliest known dragons, though, look very little like dinosaurs; instead they all look like giant snakes.

One of the earliest-attested dragons is the Sumerian Ušumgal, which is said to have been a gigantic serpent. Another dragon-like creature in Sumerian mythology is the Mušḫuššu, whose name literally means “furious serpent.” The Mušḫuššu is described and depicted in ancient Mesopotamian art as having the hind legs of an eagle, the forelegs of a lion, the head and tail of a serpent, and horns. It is clearly a composite creature formed from various parts of real-life, living animals.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Mušḫuššu, a creature from ancient Sumerian mythology with the head and tail of a serpent, the forelegs of a lion, and the hindlegs of an eagle, as it is depicted on the Ishtar Gate, originally from the city of Babylon, now on display at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany.

In ancient Greece and Rome, dragons were envisioned as giant serpents and they were believed to act as guardians of specific locations. It is on account of their traditional mythological role as guardians that dragons have received their name; the word dragon itself is derived from the Latin word draco, which is derived from the ancient Greek word δράκων (drákōn), which is the aorist active participle of the verb δέρκομαι (dérkomai), meaning “to watch.” The word dragon, then, literally means “watcher.”

We have a large number of surviving depictions of dragons from ancient Greece and Rome. The most famous ancient Greek depiction of a dragon is from the tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix by the Douris Painter, dated to between c. 480 and c. 470 BC. It famously shows a dragon as a gigantic serpent disgorging the hero Iason.

Another famous ancient Greek depiction of a dragon is a scene of Kadmos, the legendary founder of the city-state of Thebes, slaying a dragon depicted on a Paestan red-figure kylix-krater dated to between c. 350 and c. 340 BC. In this depiction, the dragon is remarkably rather small; in fact, it actually appears to be shorter than Kadmos himself.

Greek and Roman dragons are consistently represented as very serpentine and not very dinosaur-like. All the way through to the end of antiquity, dragons look like snakes.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Douris Painter dated to between c. 480 and c. 470 BC depicting the dragon of Kolchis regurgitating the hero Iason in front of the goddess Athena. Notice that the dragon just looks like a giant snake.

ABOVE: Paestan red-figure kylix-krater dated to between c. 350 and c. 340 BC depicting the hero Kadmos, the founder of Thebes, slaying a dragon sent by Ares. Notice that the dragon just looks like a giant snake.

Dragons continued to be portrayed as essentially giant serpents throughout the Early Middle Ages and much of the High Middle Ages as well. Dragons in Germanic mythology are pretty much always envisioned as giant snakes. In Norse mythology, there are several different dragons, including Jörmungandr, the giant serpent who is said to encircle the realm of Midgard, and Níðhöggr, the giant serpent who gnaws on the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree.

Both dragons are portrayed as giant serpents. An eleventh-century depiction of Jörmungandr as a giant serpent actually survives on the Altuna Runestone, which depicts the god Thor sitting in a boat, clutching his hammer and fishing for Jörmungandr, who can be seen in the watery depths below the ship.

The tenth-century AD English poem Beowulf doesn’t give a very detailed description of its dragon, but the author of the poem almost certainly envisioned it as a giant serpent.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Altuna Runestone, an eleventh-century Viking runestone depicting the god Thor fishing for Jörmungandr

It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that dragons came to be imagined in western Europe in anything close to the form that we imagine them in today, with wings, legs, horns, and fiery breath. Some of the earliest known depictions of recognizably modern dragons are found in MS Harley 3244, a lavishly illustrated medieval manuscript produced in England at some point in around the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

A depiction of a green two-legged dragon with two wings and fiery breath appears on folio 39 verso of MS Harley 3244, alongside a very frightened-looking elephant. Later, a more famous depiction of a red, four-legged dragon with four wings, horns, and fiery breath occurs on folio 59.

ABOVE: Illustration of a green, two-legged, winged, fire-breathing dragon from folio 39 verso of MS Harley 3244

ABOVE: Illustration of a red, four-legged, winged, fire-breathing dragon from folio 59 of MS Harley 3244

The irony is that the reason why modern depictions of dragons look so much like dinosaurs is because they are directly modeled on dinosaurs. Since the early twentieth century, depictions of dragons have been increasingly influenced by contemporary depictions of dinosaurs and, as time has progressed, dragons have grown increasingly dinosaurian.

We can actually see the evolution in how dragons have been imagined over the course of the past century by looking at depictions of the dragon Smaug from J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit and examining how they have changed.

As it happens, J. R. R. Tolkien himself drew an illustration of how he imagined Smaug in 1936. Tolkien’s illustration shows Smaug with a long, snake-like body, pointed, cat-like ears, and wings that are folded back. In the illustration, Smaug has four distinctly lizard-like legs. His right front leg is fully visible and his left front leg and left back leg are partly visible. His right leg has at least four claws.

ABOVE: J. R. R. Tolkien’s own illustration of the dragon Smaug, showing him as a long snake-like creature with cat-like ears, lizard-like arms, and wings

In the 1977 animated Rankin/Bass film The Hobbit, Smaug is no longer snake-like; instead, he is portrayed with a much larger, fatter body. His arms are bigger and more muscular. His wings are more distinctly bat-like. Meanwhile, his entire face is unmistakably feline and his entire back is covered in thick, red fur.

ABOVE: Smaug as he is depicted in the 1977 animated film The Hobbit

If we look at Smaug as he is represented in the 2013 live action film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, however, we see that all the cat-like and mammalian features that were present in the older representations have vanished and he has become much more dinosaurian.

This version of Smaug has the face of a full-on dinosaur, with no ears to be seen whatsoever. Instead of ears, he has horns on his head—something that neither the version of Smaug in Tolkien’s 1936 illustration nor the version of Smaug in the 1977 animated film had.

The 2013 version of Smaug also notably only has two legs; instead of having a proper pair of front legs, his clawed wings function as his arms. This is a novel development, considering that, in both Tolkien’s original illustration and in the 1977 animated film, Smaug has four legs and wings, giving him a total of six appendages rather than four.

ABOVE: Smaug as he is represented in the 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Dinosaur bones have definitely influenced how dragons are portrayed today—but they are probably not the original source of inspiration for the idea of dragons itself. The original source of inspiration for nearly all stories about dragons is almost certainly snakes. This is evidenced by the fact that nearly all early depictions of dragons show them as snake-like creatures and it has only been within the past century that dragons have really started to look really dinosaurian.

ABOVE: Shot from the last episode of the HBO television series Game of Thrones of the dragon Drogon incinerating the Iron Throne. The dragons in Game of Thrones are based on dinosaurs; ancient and medieval dragons probably are not.

The Cyclops and the elephant skull

In Book Nine of the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus encounters the Cyclops Polyphemos, a one-eyed giant who lives in a cave and eats humans. The early twentieth-century Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel claimed that this story might have been inspired by the ancient Greeks discovering the skulls of prehistoric dwarf elephants in caves and mistaking them for the skulls of one-eyed giants. Abel’s claim has become extremely popular, but it is almost certainly wrong, for reasons I have already explained in this article I published on the subject back in May 2019.

First of all, we have no evidence that the ancient Greeks ever excavated dwarf elephant skulls. Othenio Abel claimed that the Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedokles of Akragas (lived c. 494 – c. 434 BC) studied dwarf elephant skulls in southern Italy and connected them to the story of Polyphemos in Homer’s Odyssey.

If this claim were true, it would potentially lend some credence to Abel’s hypothesis; unfortunately, it is completely false. None of the surviving fragments of Empedokles’s writings mention anything about skulls, elephants, giants, Cyclopes, Polyphemos, or even caves. I don’t know if Othenio Abel was lying or if he just misremembered, but, the fact of the matter is, his claim about Empedokles is flat-out untrue.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a dwarf elephant skull on display in Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich, Germany

Second of all, all the evidence we do have actually goes directly contrary to Abel’s hypothesis. All the surviving archaic Greek depictions of Cyclopes depict them as completely human apart from being gigantic and having only one eye. In ancient Greek depictions, the Cyclopes don’t have tusks or oddly misshapen heads like we would expect them to if they were inspired by misidentified elephant skulls.

In fact, ancient Greek depictions of Polyphemos don’t even consistently show him with only one eye. Some early representations of Polyphemos seem to show him with two eyes. This strongly suggests that there were other versions of the Polyphemos story in circulation in ancient times in which Polyphemos had two eyes, just like any normal human being.

In my opinion, it is far more likely that the reason why Polyphemos only has one eye in the Odyssey is for the sake of narrative convenience. Quite simply, the reason why he has only one eye is because, that way, it is easier to explain how Odysseus was able to blind him so easily.

ABOVE: Black-figure amphora painting dating to c. 660 BC depicting Odysseus and his men gouging out Polyphemos’s eye, as described in Book Nine of the Odyssey

It is worth observing that the mere fact that there is a story about the hero Odysseus feuding with a giant in Book Nine of the Odyssey isn’t remarkable in any way, since there were plenty of stories about heroes fighting giants floating around in the ancient world long before the Odyssey was even composed.

For instance, in the ancient Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Huwawa, the hero Gilgamesh fights the giant Huwawa. This story was later incorporated into the standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Huwawa is referred to as “Humbaba.”

For all these reasons, in my opinion, it is far more likely that the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos was inspired by older stories of confrontations between heroes and giants than it is that the story was inspired by the Greeks discovering dwarf elephant skulls.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Old Babylonian terra-cotta plaque depicting the ogre Humbaba, who is faced by the hero Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh

The griffin and the dinosaur

Many ancient Greek writers record stories about griffins—vicious creatures with the heads and wings of eagles and the bodies of lions that were said to guard hoards of gold in the lands of the Far East.

The earliest surviving written description of the griffins comes from the tragedy Prometheus Bound, which is traditionally attributed to the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BC). In the tragedy, the character Prometheus warns the princess Io that, when she travels through the Far East, she must beware the griffins and the Arimaspians—mythical one-eyed horsemen who were also said to reside in the region. He says, in lines 802 through 806, as translated by James Romm:

“Now hear your next unfriendly spectacle:
watch out for sharp-beaked, barkless hounds of Zeus,
the griffins, and the Arimaspian host,
the one-eyed horsemen who inhabit there,
beside the gold-flecked stream of river Pluto.”

The Greek historian Ktesias of Knidos (lived c. late fifth century BC) gave a detailed description of a griffin in his book Indika. Ktesias’s Indika has now been mostly lost, but his description of the griffin has been preserved through quotation in a surviving summary of his book written by the Christian patriarch Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 AD). Ktesias writes, as translated by J. H. Freese:

“There is also gold [in India], not found in rivers and washed, as in the river Paktolos [in Lydia], but in many large mountains which are inhabited by Grypes [i.e. Griffins]. These are four-footed birds as large as a wolf, their legs and claws resembling those of a lion; their breast feathers are red, those of the rest of the body black. Although there is abundance of gold in the mountains, it is difficult to get it because of these birds.”

Griffins are also frequently depicted in works of ancient Greek art, where they are shown as creatures with the heads and wings of birds and the bodies of lions.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Greek bronze sheet relief dating to c. 600 BC depicting two griffins, discovered at Olympia and now on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 380 showing the god Apollon riding on the back of a griffin

Adrienne Mayor first proposed her hypothesis about the origin of the griffin myth in a paper published in 1993 in the journal Folklore. She has reiterated it in numerous publications since then. Basically, she observes that the dinosaur Protoceratops was a large quadruped with a beak. She also observes that fossils of this dinosaur are common throughout the Altai region of central Asia, which is roughly the area where classical Greek authors claimed griffins lived.

Based on this, she has speculated that ancient Skythian prospectors may have discovered some of these fossils eroding out of the landscape while they were searching for gold and that these discoveries may have been a source of inspiration for stories about griffins. She claims that, eventually, by around the seventh century BC, these stories about griffin skeletons in Skythia made their way to Greece, becoming distorted along the way, thereby becoming the basis for the western griffin legend.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a mounted Protoceratops andrewsi skeleton on display in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Paleontologist Mark Witton has already written an excellent and thorough debunking of Mayor’s hypothesis, but I’m going to address the issue here as well. I’m going to cover many of the same points as him, but with some different evidence and a slightly different perspective.

First of all, the earliest known depictions of griffins actually come not from Skythia or from Greece, but rather from ancient Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC. There is a whole menagerie of surviving depictions of creatures with the heads and wings of birds and the bodies of lions from all across the ancient Near East dating from the fourth millennium BC onwards.

There are even depictions of griffins in Greece dated to long before the time when Mayor argues that the Greeks heard of Protoceratops skeletons in Skythia. Griffins are common motif in ancient Minoan artworks dating to the second millennium BC. Multiple griffins appear in the frescoes from the Throne Room of the Minoan palatal complex at Knossos and another one appears in a famous fresco from the building Xeste 3 in the Minoan settlement of Akrotiri on the island of Thera.

Adrienne Mayor, however, simply chooses to ignore these early depictions of griffins because she says we have no way of knowing what folklore might have been associated with them. This isn’t really a good excuse, though; the fact is, these older Near Eastern depictions of griffins exist, meaning any attempt to explain the origin of griffins needs to account for them.

ABOVE: Restored fresco from the “Throne Room” of the Minoan palatal complex at Knossos, depicting a griffin with the head of a bird and the body of a feline

ABOVE: Remarkably well-preserved fresco from Xeste 3 of the Minoan settlement of Akrotiri on the island of Thera depicting a goddess seated on a high platform receiving gifts of saffron from a monkey and a woman while a griffin sits behind her. The griffin is portrayed with the head and wings of a bird and the body of a feline.

Furthermore, although surviving depictions of griffins vary drastically from each other, none of them bear any unusual features that could only be explained by hypothetical fossil influence. In art, griffins are not depicted as bearing any particularly strong resemblance to Protoceratops fossils. The only real similarity is that griffins and Protoceratops are both beaked quadrupeds. The hind legs and tails of griffins in Greek art are unmistakably feline, while the heads and wings are unmistakably avian.

In fact, the anatomy of griffins in ancient Greek art is actually drastically divergent from the anatomy of Protoceratops. While griffins in Greek art nearly always have wings, Protoceratops doesn’t have wings at all. Instead, Protoceratops has a large, bony neck frill, which is something that all griffins, whether Greek or non-Greek, most certainly don’t have. Also, in most classical depictions, griffins have pointed, cat-like ears—something you won’t find in any Protoceratops skeleton.

Adrienne Mayor has tried argue that maybe the frills were broken off on the Protoceratops specimens that the ancient Skythians discovered or maybe the frills got turned into wings and ears through repeated redrawing. These aren’t inherently implausible claims, but we don’t have any evidence to support any of them; we don’t have any ancient depictions of griffins with Protoceratops-like frills at all, so we don’t have any good reason to suppose that they ever had them.

Meanwhile, in surviving ancient Greek texts, griffins are described specifically in terms of their resemblance to real, living animals. Ktesias’s description of what griffins looked like doesn’t mention anything about bones or fossils; instead he describes griffins as composite creatures with the features of lions and birds.

Additionally, Greek sources consistently describe griffins as living creatures, not as ancient skeletons dug out of the ground. There is not a single surviving ancient source that actually mentions anything about anyone finding any part of an alleged griffin skeleton.

Then there’s the problem pointed out by Witton in his article that the ancient Skythian gold mines are located hundreds of miles away from the nearest known deposits of Protoceratops fossils. This destroys the last substantial link between Protoceratops and griffins that was arguably holding this hypothesis together.

The most parsimonious explanation for griffins is that they arose in the Near East as imaginary composite creatures composed of different parts from various living animals and spread to Greece from the Near East. There’s simply no reason to assume there was any influence from fossils.

Conclusion

I am not strictly opposed to the idea that, in some cases, discoveries of fossils in ancient times may have helped inspire some stories, but I find it annoying how people automatically assume that, anytime there is a story about a giant or a dragon or some other mythical creature, that story clearly must have been inspired by ancient people discovering fossils—even in instances where we have absolutely no evidence that this was the case.

I think that we need to be really cautious when writing about this subject. We can’t just assume that mythical creatures were inspired by fossils unless we have clear evidence that this was the case, like an ancient text explicitly linking the mythical creature to bones that were discovered somewhere or the bone of some prehistoric creature discovered at an ancient site alongside an inscription linking it to the mythical creature.

Even then, we still shouldn’t assume that all iterations of that mythical creature were inspired by fossils. Even with that kind of extraordinary evidence, all we would be able to say is that one particular version of the creature had been influenced by fossil discoveries.