The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs mammoths and other extinct animals
influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythology 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. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous
creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the
arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through
careful research and meticulous documentation she convincingly shows that many of the giants
and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species
that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor shows the Greeks and
Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They
frequently encountered the fossilized bones 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 griffin for example sprang from tales
first told by Scythian gold-miners who passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the
Altai Mountains encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered
the ground. Like their modern counterparts the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured
impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums they attempted to
reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long
thought to be fantasy the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant
bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected
narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries Adrienne Mayor
illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.
