Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”
Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).
So unicorns are real
behold… a unicorn
I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED to find out this is, in fact, the case.
Questing Beast
- Neck of a snake
- body of a leopard
- haunches of a lion
- feet off a hart (deer)
So is it
Or….
don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?
these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.
In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?
And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!
Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another
It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.
And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!
By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?
Well-
- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).
Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:
Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.
This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.
Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a
It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.
In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:
One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:
The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.
South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:
What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?
The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.
In North America there is the Piasa Bird
Which wikipedia tells me comes from “ the large Mississippian culture city of Cahokia,” it’s describes as
What fossils could have been found in that region:
Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.
Then we get our European style dragon:
One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a Cetiosaurus
which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.
Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.
Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:
A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.
If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.
IIRC, another possible explanation for long snake-like dragons/sea serpents in Africa could’ve been Basilosaurus, a whale from the Paleogene whose skeleton looked like this:
A lot of the most complete specimens have been found in Egypt.
You know what, I’m tired of getting notifications for this post and not saying anything about it. I know that last time I complained about this sort of thinking, I got called out by revretch, who called me a gatekeeper and then blocked me. But I don’t have anything left to live for anymore so I’m going to let my science and education background take over for a moment and discuss this in depth.
Okay, not in depth, I’ll try to be brief.
Yes, I know tumblr likes to believe scientists are silly old fools for refusing to accept the truth that is right in front of them. Fine. Believe in what you want. But the problem is that a lot of the information in the above post is either long discredited, not taken seriously by archaeologists/folklorists for good reason, or
Animals have inspired a lot of mythical creatures. That is true.
Fossils have inspired a few mythical creatures. That is also true.
Fossils have not inspired the creatures in the above post. Not provably, at any rate, and certainly not enough for any self-respecting archaeologist to take them seriously.
Why not?
There’s a popular misconception about how fossils are formed. People tend to think they look something like in Jurassic Park 3, where a Velociraptor is being excavated in Montana (that already makes it impossible, but bear with me).
Look how nice that fossil is. It looks exactly like an animal. You can see the head, the shape of the body, the arms and legs and tail. You easily picture what it looked like alive.
This is NOT what fossils look like.
Real fossils tend to be disarticulated. Broken up. Spread over a large area. Believe me, I know! I’m a paleontology washout who’s volunteered on at least 3 digs in 3 different countries! The only information an average person could get out of most real fossils is “this was an animal”, and “this was a BIG animal”. Nobody would have deduced frills and wings and stuff like that.
The griffon hypothesis up there? We owe it to Adrienne Mayor, and it’s popular among paleontologists but not archaeologists. It makes sense on a very superficial level – It Stands To Reason, after all – but once you start looking at it in detail it breaks down. Even if, somehow, someone saw a Protoceratops skeleton in enough detail to see wings and beaks and stuff, why would they leave out the teeth? The stubby-toed feet? The ridiculous tail? Mark Witton, a person actually connected to paleontology, has done a great article on the subject.
Griffons were inspired by a number of things, including Mesopotamian royal art, and there’s at least one real animal behind the griffon (and it’s not a fossil). But that’s another story.
What about elephant-skull cyclopes? Again, it sounds like it makes sense! Certainly more so than the griffon-Protoceratops. But here we run into another problem… complete lack of proof. It sounds reasonable, but it can’t be proven. And “one-eyed giant” isn’t exactly a colossal feat of imagination - giants are one of the standard baddies in legend, and making them one-eyed makes them just more monstrous. You can just as easily argue that cyclopes originated in solar wheel imagery associated with the gods, which is why their name means “wheel-eye” and not “one-eye”, and that also ties nicely into their association with metallurgy. Again, Mark Witton has more on that.
Creatures LEGITIMATELY based on fossils typically look nothing like their progenitors, and tend to incorporate features based on their fossil location.
Mammoth remains, for instance! Those are found sticking out of eroded riverbanks, so there must have been a big animal underground! In China they are the yin shu, an enormous mouse or mole that digs underground but dies as soon as the sun touches it. (My interpretation below. Note that I couldn’t resist making it mammothy anyway)
In Siberia the witkes is a horned lake monster that demands offerings of the people who cross its water. Note that the “tusks” are seen as horns, and because the fossils are found near water, it becomes a water animal. See how the facts of the fossils become part of the legend? (Again, my interpretation below, and same comment as before)
The lindwurm of Klagenfurt was based on the discovery of a cave rhinoceros skull. Again, you can see how little the creature has to do with the fossil! People already have dragons on the brain, so finding a skull reinforces that, instead of altering it. You’ve got crocodile skulls in castles in Hungary displayed as dragon remains. Same story. Everything’s a dragon if you want it to be.
Brontotheres (thunder beasts) are named so because of the legends of the Great Plains people! Their remains were seen as the casualties of great battles, and the name honors that legend. Again, they aren’t described as being big rhino-like horned animals, just as… big animals that are now dead.
As for the others, again, those are incredible speculations that require, once again, to dismiss far more obvious things that would have inspired them. And there’s a whole lot of cultural evolution that goes on that isn’t taken into account.
The unicorn in particular. There’s no reason to think that it was anything other than the one-horned Indian rhinoceros. Elasmotherium tends to get dragged into the discussion, but all the original unicorn stories tell of a one-horned Indian monster. Not something that lives underground.
The Piasa? The above post compares it to pterosaurs, but the original did not have wings! It was a version of the “underwater panther”, a mythical underwater lynx of the Northeast Woodlands and Great Lakes regions. There’s a long story behind that but that’s, again, beyond the scope of what I wanted to say.
Of course, if you want to consider the underwater panther a dinosaur as well, be my guest.
Regarding the sauropods (and Titanoboa, and whales) inspiring giant snakes thing.
If only there was some terrifyingly large, reptilian, legless, snake-like creature in South America…
Or Africa…
Or Asia to fire people’s imagination and cause them to think of giant snakes?
And it’s not like rainbows aren’t associated worldwide with snakes because of their, well, long and thin and curvy nature.
Now if you think I’m a big horrible gatekeeping meanie for saying all this, that’s fine! There’s still a lot we don’t know, and there’s still a lot of things that could very well be based on fossils, so you can keep your hopes up!
Like the ketos of Troy, for instance!
That… looks awfully like it could be a skull! Adrienne Mayor thinks it’s a fossil Samotherium, which sounds like a stretch. It looks more like a pterosaur to me. But still, that’s something that could indeed be a fossil!
The other thing about all this is the “scientists didn’t listen to native people who told them about monsters they’d encountered”. And yes, this is true and a noble thing to believe in. But also consider that one of the reasons dinosaurs were believed to exist in “darkest Africa” (all the scare quotes) is that it was held that native people couldn’t possibly be creative enough to imagine them. Europeans talk about giant reptiles? Myths, legends, folklore. Non-Europeans talk about giant reptiles? OMG LIVING DINOSAURS. It goes both ways, sadly.
Mythical creatures are the product of culture, literature, and biology. Reducing their creation to “sees weird fossil => invents monster” is, to me, just sad, and cuts out a lot of the process and wonder and translation errors and sheer mistakes that intervene.
A lot of mythics in Scandinavian culture are humanoid, but a lot of those that aren’t are based on real animals, particularly snakes, horses, fish, whales, and ravens. Off the top of my head I can’t name a single one that I would happily slap on a “misinterpretation of a fossil” tag on.
