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THE FIRST FOSSIL HUNTERS: PALEONTOLOGY IN GREEK AND ROMAN
TIMES
BY ADRIENNE MAYOR
(PRINCETON 2000)
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Herakles and Hesione confront the Monster of Troy, Corinthian vase, ca 550 BC, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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. What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? What if these beings were more than merely fictions? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species tht were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.
The Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized remains 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 Griffins, for example, sprang from tales first told by ancient gold prospectors who had observed the bizarre skeletons of Protocertops and other beaked dinosaurs of the Gobi and Turpan deserts.
Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive fossil bones, tusks, and teeth, and they displayed them in temples and museums as the remains of giants, heroes, and monsters from the glorious days of myth. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of discoveries of giant bones were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these fascinating, long-forgotten narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.
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"This is a fantastic book! Mayor convinces us that some of our most treasured mythical creatures really were based on the skeletons of exrtinct animals. She has succeeded in setting the history of paleontolgy on its ear; the art of skeletal restoration was not invented in the modern world." --Jack Horner, Museum of the Rockies, author of Dinosaur Lives
"Mayor has done an admirable job of tracking down...a paleontological bonanza centuries before the first dinosaur remains were recognised by modern science." --Richard Fortey, author of Trilobite!
"Blending the thrill of scientific discovery with the fascination of ancient folklore and legends,...in many ways this book resembles a detective story....One of the best books of recent years." --Walter Friedrich, author of Fire in the Sea
"In one of the best nonfictional detective stories I've read recently, Mayor follows a trail of clues east from the Black Sea to the gold fields of the Hindu Kush, Altai Mountains and Gobi Desert where the archetypal griffin is revealed to be none other than Protoceratops." --Norman MacLeod, London Museum of Natural History
"After reading Mayor's The First Fossil Hunters, one thing is certain. You'll never look at classical mythology--or the history of paleontology--the same way again." --Steve Voynick, Rock and Gem
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The First Fossil Hunters is translated into Spanish, Korean, Hungarian, and Greek
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Novels based on Mayor's
Griffin-Protoceratops theory:
by H.N. Turteltaub
by Ullie Emigh
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