It canât 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 thereâs a lot of interesting informations in it.
And itâs 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?
- 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).
Hereâs 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, itâs called Ř´ŰعداŮâ (shirdal, âlion eagleâ). Now, itâs been the subject of some debate and itâs not confirmed, but thereâs a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as âa lion with an eagleâs headâ:
Check the âoriginâ part of the wikipedia page for âgriffinâ if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, itâs just a theory, but I think itâs super cool.
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