Fossil Link to Myths' Monsters
Monsters in Classical mythology may have been invented to explain the discovery of dinosaur bones. Adrienne Mayor, a Classical folklorist, says in the latest issue of Archaeology magazine that myths about legendary beasts might derive from fossil remains of mastodons, mammoths, giant giraffes, rhinoceroses and other large Mediterranean basin animals."Ancient authors turned to myths to explain the skeletons of amazing size that they observed in Asia Minor and Greece," said Ms Mayor, author of a forthcoming book, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. "Modern palaeontology demonstrates that prehistoric fossils exist in the very places where myths about giant beings arose."
She cites the Homeric myth of a sea monster that appeared on the Trojan coast after a flood and led to the sacking of Troy. A Corinthian vase in Boston's Fine Arts Museum was painted in about 550 BC, with the monster as a disembodied white head sticking out of the ground.
"Scholars have assumed that an incompetent artist made a very poor drawing of a sea monster peeking out of a cave, but look again at the creature, keeping in mind that large fossil remains erode out of the shoreline near Troy, and the mystery of the crudely drawn monster is solved," Ms Mayor writes.
"The artist has actually drawn an enormous animal skull emerging out of a dark cliffside. Now the painting takes on a new meaning: a sudden and surprising exposure of a huge fossil skull on the coast of Troy may well have been the inspiration for the Homeric tale."
She suggests that one model for the picture might have been the 2ft-long skull of Samotherium, a giant giraffe.
She notes that especially dense concentrations of large fossil bones were renowned in Ancient times as the places where entire armies were blasted by Zeus's thunderbolts in the myth of the battle between the gods and the giants.
[Source: The Times / London / By James Bone - Mar 20 2000]
