In this clip Harry Potter and the students of Hogwarts meet a hippogryph, an animal that's sort of a horse, but with a huge raptor beak, and wings. This creature in this movie is based on the idea of the gryphon, a horse/raptor hyrbid animal. So where did the idea of gryphon's come from? That's an interesting story, and I recently read a book that just may explain it.
This is the later edition, from 2011, of The First Fossil Hunters, and it has a lot of added material from the original version published in 2000.
Over 20 years ago, I was driving my taxi around the Huntington Beach area one morning, and there was a really interesting interview with an author. Her name was Adrienne Mayor, and she had just published a book about the archeological finds made in the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean region. Her weird path to write that book, The First Fossil Hunters, started with the ancient legends of the gryphon (or griffon). Going back well over 2,000 years, the gryphons were said to be mythical creatures with a horse-like body, a huge, eagle-like beak, and often with wings. Gryphons were said to hoard and guard gold. Some people believed gryphons could fly, some didn't. The weird thing Adrienne noticed was that gryphons weren't part of the mythology or the Greek and Roman cultures. In those days, gryphons were believed to simply be a weird creature that actually existed, far to the East. She wondered if there were some real fossils that might have inspired the idea of the gryphons. This basic idea set her off, digging through hundreds of accounts of lesser known writers from the Greek and Roman eras, and for archeological evidence that would corroborate these legends.
It took years, but she was finally able to figure out that in the land of the ancient Scythians, parts of modern day Kazakhstan into Mongolia, on the trade routes in central Asia, there were ancient gold mines. There were also fossils on the surface of a creature called the protoceatops, a sheep sized dinosaur with a huge beaked head. It's a cousin to the triceratops that most of us are familiar with, and there are many fossils of them in and around Mongolia.
A protoceratops skeleton, with the huge, beaked head. The frilled part, and the back of the head, was often broken on fossils. It's possible that broken pieces of these bones were believe to be wing bones, giving rise to the idea that these creatures had wings.
With a lot of diligent research, Adrienne Mayor proved the possibility that ancient people had seen fossils of the huge beaked skulls of protoceratops, in the general area where a lot of gold was mined. The jumbled up up fossil bones could have been woven into legends of hybrid creatures, part horse, part huge bird, that guarded the gold rich areas. Those legends had the effect of scaring a lot of people away from the gold rich reasons, acting to protect the gold for the local miners of that era.
While she can't say absolutely that this is how the legend of gryphons came to be, she makes a strong case for the idea. The book goes on from there, based on her diligent research, to explore reports of giant, fossilized bones found in ancient times by the Greeks and Romans. It elaborates on the different interpretations made from those fossils, to people who had no concept of dinosaurs, mammoths, mastadons, ancient rhinos, and other extinct creatures.
The Mediterranean region is really geologically active, and it's relatively new land, geologically. So the fossils found 2,000 to 3,000 years ago are not dinosaurs, like farther east in Asia. Most of what they found were huge bones from later mega fauna, such as mammoths, mastadons, wooly rhinos and similar creatures. In the early era, roughly 2,700 years ago, these bones were often thought to be of mythical giants from their legends. Many collections were reburied in that era in huge stone graves for giants. Sometimes giant bones, like a mastadon femur, which looks like a huge human femur, would be put on display in a town, usually tied to a legend of a local giant that won a battle or something. Much like today, these became tourist attractions, drawing people to see the huge bones.
As time went on in the ancient era, some better thinkers realized that these giant, fossilized bones, were from ancient animals that no longer existed, not from 20 foot tall giants. Today, with hundreds of years of science behind us, we know that thousands of species that once existed are now extinct. But the idea of extinction didn't exist in the ancient era, like it does now. But some writers did come to the conclusion that many of these bones were from ancient animals, ones that no longer existed.
If you have an interest in history, mythology, archeology, or paleontology, this book is a really interesting read. Although it took me over 20 years to get around to reading it, after I first heard the original interview about the book. The 2011 rewrite has a bunch more info not in the original version. Once the book was out, a lot of scientists, across many disciplines, contacted Ms. Mayor, with bits and pieces of info on these ideas, that helped flesh out the stories of ancient bones found in ancient times. While we tend to think of archeology as something that started 150 or 200 years ago, it turns out that humans have been finding, reporting, and trying to figure out fossils for well over 2,000 years. So if any of this sounds interesting to you, check this book out. The First Fossil Hunters. (Not a paid link).
I started a new blog now, about side hustles and small businesses in these crazy times. Check it out.
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