Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (6 page)

Bird aspect ratios can vary from 1.5 to around 18, so let us assume something around 10. Therefore, a 245 m
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wing area would mean the Rukh would need a wingspan of around 50 meters. Of course, there is a problem here, because this applies only to a Rukh that is already in flight. To behave as legends say it did, with such a “small” wing-span it would need to swoop down at high speed, grab an elephant, and fly off without losing momentum. If the bird were to stop, kill the elephant, and then try to get lift again with the elephant in tow, such wings would not have worked at all. If you want to understand the physics of that sort of behavior, get a degree in aeronautical engineering.

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For years, archaeologists assumed that punctures found in the skulls of early human ancestors, like some of the australopithecines living 3.5 million years ago, were made by the fangs of great cats, but in 2006 a team of a researchers published evidence in the
Physical Journal of Anthropology
revealing that these punctures were nearly identical to punctures that large eagles make with their beaks and talons when they kill monkeys today. This led the team to argue that birds of prey were playing a big part in hunting our forebears. Such finds also raise the question of whether we might have some instinctive fear of large raptors buried deep within our genes.

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Seagulls can be downright vicious. Accidentally wandering into their nesting sites will almost always lead to a flurry of feathers, shrieks, mobbing, and pecking. Moreover, a study published in
Nature Geoscience
in 2011 found a period of bizarre seabird behavior in 1961 when seagulls frequently slammed themselves into beach homes and cars (widely thought to have inspired Hitchcock’s film), which came about as a result of the birds suffering nerve damage after being exposed to neurotoxins released by a toxic algae bloom off the coast of California.

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Beastly Blends—Chimera, Griffon, Cockatrice, Sphinx

“These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes.”

—Dr. Moreau,
The Island of Dr. Moreau

Not far removed from the realm of the Nemean lion, Calydonian boar, and Rukh are monstrous animals not of unusual size but of unusual form. Seemingly inspired by ancient people dwelling in a drug-induced haze, many of these monsters are bizarre anatomical blends that have been unbelievably stitched together. Multiple heads, duplicated limbs, bodies combining wings and claws, and tails with teeth, these monsters proved common throughout most of ancient and medieval history.

Among the most notable are the Manticore of Persian myth, a beast that had the head of a human, the body of a lion, and a tail covered in venomous spikes that it could launch at its foes like arrows. There were also the many-headed monsters, like the reptilian Hydra that battled Hercules, and the three-headed hound
Cerberus who guarded the gates of Hades. And some blends just mixed and matched animal traits without any sort of logic, like the Griffin, which had the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, and the Cockatrice, which was part rooster and part dragon. Yet few beastly blends are as well known today as Chimera of Lycia.

First mentioned in Homer’s
Iliad,
Chimera is described as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle.” As if being part lion and part goat with a snake for a tail were not disturbing enough, Homer added that it had the ability to breathe a “terrible flame of bright fire” as well.

Some descriptions were far bolder. Hesiod suggested in his
Theogony
that Chimera had multiple heads, one of a “grim-eyed lion,” another of a goat, and a third of a serpent, which some translations describe as a dragon. As for its body, its front portion was leonine, the hind portion reptilian, and the torso goatlike. Hesiod, like Homer, suggests that the monster was capable of breathing fire, but contrary to what modern audiences might expect, it is the goat rather than the dragon head that seems to have done the fire breathing.

Ancient artists went wild with Chimera. Some portrayed it as Homer described, with a snake for a tail, a goat’s torso, and a lion head with lion forelimbs, while others followed Hesiod’s description, placing three heads on the front of the beast, with lion forelimbs, reptilian hind limbs, and, occasionally,
dragonlike wings sticking out from its back. Some artistic representations of the monster fall in between the two, portraying a beast with a goat head awkwardly stuck out of the creature’s spine with reptilian and leonine traits mingled throughout the rest of the body.

Yet as often as Chimera appears in Greek art and literature, the fears that it represented are not as straightforward as those presented by the merely monstrous animals discussed earlier. It seems logical that Chimera partially stood for the unknown dangers beyond civilized lands since it was said to dwell in the land of Lycia, around 500 miles east of Athens, in what today is southeastern Turkey. Even so, the dangers posed by wild beasts were well presented in more mundane monsters like the Nemean lion and Calydonian boar. Chimera had much more to it, but why? What was it that drove people to fear a fire-breathing creature with such a blend of unusual animal traits?

It is a challenge to conceive of the possibility that Chimera’s creation was the result of a misinterpreted animal encounter. It just does not make sense. Female lions work in groups to attack prey at night, so it would not be unlikely for a survivor to come away claiming to have been attacked by a lion with multiple heads. But with a snake for a tail?

Snakes are not known for teamwork, even within their own species, and the idea of a snake being associated with a lion attack is hard to believe. It is conceivable that a poor soul might have been ambushed by both a viper and a lion at the same time during some unlucky evening. But it is a stretch to conceive that this was common enough to create a myth.

And then there is the goat. Who came up with this? Goats are eaten by lions.
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There is no getting around it: The concept of an animal
encounter creating Chimera just doesn’t make sense. So if the idea of ecology inspiring Chimera is illogical, could there have been something biological behind it? Like other animal-inspired monsters, it is worth considering whether a mutant of some sort was born that the ancients viewed as a monster.

Animals can sometimes be born with the traits of other animals on their bodies. Horses, which normally have just one toe, can be born with multiple toes, dolphins can be born with legs, and humans can be born with tails. These mutations happen when very old genes, which have been inactive in an animal for years, for reasons not entirely understood suddenly become expressed instead of the genes that normally should. Called atavisms, these genetic mutations can create chimeric-looking organisms.

But atavisms are not totally random in what they do. They do not simply grant a random trait. Humans are not born with wings and snakes are not born with fur. Instead, they produce traits that existed in the evolutionary past of that animal. Think about it: Human ancestors had tails, horse ancestors had multiple toes, dolphin ancestors had limbs. Odd as it is, there is a logic to the mutation.

Yet Chimera does not show characteristics of lion ancestors mixed with those of a lion; it has characteristics of a goat and snake. This is not helpful. If the lion were the base animal that an atavism were taking place in, the lion could be born with a weasel-like face and shorter limbs because the evolutionary lineage that eventually led to lions contained a lot of weasel-like predators. But it would not be possible for a lion to be born with any snakelike traits because lions did not evolve from snakes or their relatives. The same is true of goats. Lions and goats are actually relatively closely related, but traits that are identifiably goatlike, like a goat head with horns, appear in the goat evolutionary lineage long after it breaks away from the evolutionary lineage leading to lions.

Even if the evolutionary pathways were different and the lion’s ancestry did stem from a lineage that had given rise to goats and snakes, it is hard to imagine a mutant carrying all of these traits
surviving birth, let alone its first few months of life, with the sorts of deformities that would have been required for Chimera to have existed. For these reasons it is impossible for an animal looking like Chimera to have ever been born.

Yet the basic ideas upon which Chimera is founded are not, on their own, totally ridiculous. Take, for example, Hesiod’s description of the beast having multiple heads. Animals can have two or more heads when twins or triplets develop abnormally in the womb.

Under normal circumstances, an embryo forms from a sperm and an egg. But sometimes, shortly after fertilization, the cluster of cells destined to become the embryo spontaneously splits into two fully functional clusters of cells that go on to become two embryos. This results in identical twins. However, it is speculated that sometimes the two clusters of cells do not entirely break away from one another or that after breaking away they partially reconnect. The result, if the twins survive to birth, is conjoined twins.

Among humans, such individuals’ lives can be medically challenging, as two brains are often forced to share vital organs like stomachs and hearts. For animals, survival is unlikely, since obtaining food requires finely tuned senses and considerable coordination. Two brains trying to control a single body makes coordination difficult, and animals with two heads are rarely seen surviving to adulthood in the wild. Even so, two-headed and even three-headed animals
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can exist and might have inspired the creation of Chimera and other beastly blends like Hydra and Cerberus.

The idea of having limbs that differ from one another in size and shape is not preposterous either. It is perfectly reasonable for an animal to be born, as the result of mutation, with hind limbs that are shorter than the forelimbs or are deformed and thus different-looking from the rest of the body. Again, these sorts of mutations would make life very hard, and survival to adulthood would be extremely unlikely. Although it is (just barely) feasible that a multiheaded lion
with deformed hind limbs that were mistaken for goat legs could have existed, the poor beast would not have been able to hunt.
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No, mutation seems as unlikely an explanation for the origin of Chimera as a multiple-animal ambush in the woods. But there is another possibility: fossils.

In
The First Fossil Hunters,
Adrienne Mayor makes a persuasive argument that the half-eagle, half-lion monster known as the Griffin came about when ancient people discovered the bones of the dinosaur
Protoceratops
and tried to imagine what the animal would have looked like when alive. The idea is entirely logical—
Protoceratops
had a beak but was clearly something quite different from a bird. Moreover,
Protoceratops,
like many of the other members of the dinosaur group to which it belonged, like the iconic
Triceratops,
had a bony frill rising up from the back of its neck. This frill is thought by some paleontologists to have played a role in protecting the cervical vertebrae just behind the dinosaur’s skull. It is not unlikely that the first people who looked upon this fossil identified the bones of the frill as having been some sort of wing, particularly in light of the fact that there was a beak on the business end of the beast.

The Griffin is not alone in potentially being explained by observations of early fossils. The Cockatrice, which appears in much medieval literature and art, is presented as something of a malevolent chicken blended with reptilian or draconic features that could kill with its gaze or petrify with a touch of its toothy beak. Although a deadly petrifying gaze is one of the characteristics associated with Medusa, the morphology of the monster is strikingly similar to
many fossils dug up in China during the past decade that walk the fine line between being somewhat like modern birds and somewhat like the aggressive predatory
Velociraptor
featured in
Jurassic Park
. The first creature of this sort uncovered by modern paleontologists was an
Archaeopteryx
found in Germany a little over 150 years ago. The existence of the Cockatrice in historic literature and art raises the question of whether somebody somewhere stumbled upon a similar fossil a long time earlier. With such remarkable similarities between the fossil and the Cockatrice, the possibility seems likely. But even so, individual fossils encased in rocks go only so far in explaining monsters that mix various animal traits. It is hard to think of a single extinct species that could explain Chimera, but there are still some possibilities if the fossilization process itself is taken into consideration.