Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (7 page)

One type of fossilization process that can occur is a catastrophic flood. In desert regions, when parched land is suddenly exposed to intense thunderstorms, a flash flood can result. The rushing water often sweeps away animals in its path. Floodwaters frequently are so violent that the creatures they carry away die, and then, as the flow slows or as the rushing water turns a bend, the corpses of the animals are deposited. It is conceivable that a goat, a lion, and a snake were all killed, dumped in a mangled pile, and then covered up by sediment carried by the remaining waters from the storm. These jumbled bones would be difficult to make sense of and could have been interpreted as having been the bones of a single fantastic monster. Similarly, several wolves killed and dumped by raging waters in a single location could have led to ideas surrounding the multiheaded Cerberus, and several large reptiles captured in this way could have inspired the myth of the Hydra. Yet there is another option.

Most corpses get buried and transformed into fossils in places like lake beds and stream banks where sediment can quickly pile up on top of the corpse shortly after its death. The speed with which this happens is important, because the longer it takes to cover up a corpse with sediment, the greater the chances that a scavenger will come along, tear up the body, and scatter the bones so they are
not buried. In general, animal interactions with corpses are bad for potential fossil formation, but there is one very significant exception to this.
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In places where petroleum naturally bubbles up to Earth’s surface, pools of tar can form. No sensible animal will go near these pools, since tar is both sticky and smelly, but the thing about tar pits is that they can sometimes get covered up and appear benign. Shortly after a rainstorm, water can flow into tar pits and cover the tar, making it look like a lake. “Alternatively, in some areas dust and dirt can blow over tar pools, plants can begin to grow over the gloopy tar, and this can entice animals near,” explains paleontologist Michael Benton at the University of Bristol. In the days or weeks after water has accumulated or plants have grown, a thirsty or hungry animal might wander down and step into the tar. While trying to free itself, the animal only becomes more hopelessly stuck and sinks deeper into the quagmire. It shrieks in panic as it slides inevitably toward its death, but its cries bring the attention only of predators keen to take advantage of what they think is a wounded animal.

With the first animal trapped in the tar just a short jump from the shore, a predator leaps in to take advantage of what looks like easy prey. The predator might get one or two good bites before also becoming stuck. The predator’s attacks turn to wails of frustration and terror as it too slides toward its demise. These cries attract more predators, and the scenario continues. Ultimately, a pile of animals forms, some dead, some still alive, and the chaos, along with the scent of dead meat, attracts vultures that come in for a nibble. Some
land, feed, and get away, while others land, get stuck, and die. Eventually, the process ends when the entire mangled and smelly mess sinks below the tar.

Aside from being pretty effective at capturing animals, tar is very good at preserving bones as it solidifies over the years into black rock. True, the bones stink of petroleum and have a nasty yellow look to them, but they are otherwise in perfect condition.
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The only catch is that sorting out the fossils that result from the scavenger/predator/prey chaos is something of a paleontological nightmare. Bones from the original thirsty animal get mingled with those of the predators, and bones from predators get mingled with those of scavengers. It can take thousands of hours to pick apart the fossils left behind and work out how many animals there were and what sorts of relationships they had with one another.

With tar pits and their processes firmly in mind, consider the following story. A thirsty goat wanders down to a quiet lake. This watering hole does not appear to be staked out by predators as so many other watering holes are, and the goat steps into the shallows for a quick drink. Suddenly, it finds that it cannot pull its legs back out of the lake. Indeed, the reason the watering hole is not staked out by predators is because it is not a watering hole at all, but a tar pit. The goat gets thoroughly stuck as it struggles to get out, and its screams attract a lion. The lion pounces on the goat and gets stuck as well. Both the lion and the goat die, but before they sink beneath the tar, vultures come in to feed. These vultures, because of their light weight, do not get stuck, but their presence attracts a bird-hunting viper that slithers over the edges of the tar pit without any trouble but gets stuck in the recently churned-up tar where the lion and goat died. All three, the goat, the lion, and the snake, slowly slide into the
tar together, get preserved, and their bones are ultimately found in stinky blackened rock by people who can only wonder at what sort of creature would have left such a skeleton behind.

And Chimera was hardly alone. If a horse went down to a tar pit for a bit of water, got stuck, died, and was subsequently fed upon by a vulture that also got stuck in the tar, that would provide an explanation for the legendary Pegasus. Some art even shows Chimera battling with Pegasus. Was this linked to a find of fossils that people could barely make sense of?

The Sphinx could have also had her origin here.
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With the body of a lion, the head of a human, and the wings of an eagle, it is reasonable to propose that a human or an ancestor of modern humans like
Homo erectus
went down to a water-covered tar pit for a drink, got stuck, was attacked by a lion, and then the dying lion was feasted upon by an eagle. All got trapped and were preserved together. This, of course, raises the question of whether humans or their ancestors were stupid enough to go down to a tar pit thinking it was a safe place to get water or collect plants. When visiting tar pits today, even disguised ones, the scent of petroleum is always thick in the air and the area seems “not quite right.” But perhaps it took years of trial and error for the lesson to take hold, since fossils of humans and their ancestors do, very occasionally, turn up in tar pit fossil sites.

Among the ancient monsters that tar pits best explain is Scylla. First extensively mentioned in Homer’s
Odyssey,
Scylla lived on one side of a narrow channel opposite a monstrous whirlpool known as Charybdis that ate ships for breakfast (more on Charybdis in “The Mysterious Fathoms”). Odysseus had to sail through this channel and was forced to decide whether he would sail within reach of Charybdis or within reach of Scylla.

Chimera’s complex anatomy pales in comparison to Scylla’s. She had four eyes, six heads that each had three rows of sharp teeth, twelve legs, a feline tail, and numerous wolf or dog heads attached to her waist. Intriguingly, while Scylla is well known from later Greek art and stories to have had the upper body of a female human, her earliest depiction, on an Etruscan cylindrical ivory box covered in reliefs from 600 BC, is not human at all. The monster has multiple wolf or dog heads sticking out from several serpentine necks. Indeed, if there is a monster that stands as evidence that the ancients were looking at fossils of multiple animal skeletons jumbled together, it is Scylla.

However, this requires tar pits, and Greece (and the rest of Europe) doesn’t have any. In the heart of Los Angeles, thousands of predator fossils have been dug up. Indeed, a museum at the site has a wall of wolf skulls beautifully arranged to drive home the point that this site was a very effective predator trap. Yet the La Brea Tar Pits would have been entirely unknown to the Greeks, who knew nothing of the New World.

The reason California has a lot of tar pits is because tar and oil
tend to go hand in hand. Where there is oil, tar is often not far off. Not surprisingly, tar deposits are found in Russia, a major modern oil producer, and in the Middle East, which also has lots of oil. So it might not have been the Greeks in Greece who initially conjured up Chimera, but rather, Greeks living in colonies along the eastern coast of the Black Sea (now Russia) or along the eastern and southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where some oil reserves are located not far from the Syrian coast. Trade routes certainly ran from these colonies to Greece, and the tales of strange fossils may have spread along these routes.

It is possible that the idea behind a monster like Chimera goes even farther back, to the Kingdom of Israel between 1010 and 930 BC, when Israelites ruled the land near the inland Syrian oil fields of Tadmur. These people, or even an earlier civilization, may have seen mixed and mangled bones and come up with the ideas that ultimately coalesced into Chimera. Regardless of where and when the monster was first imagined, it is not hard to envision the discoverers of a tar pit fossil spreading word of a terrible creature with a goat’s body, a lion’s head, and a snake for a tail.

The possibility of Chimera having arisen in the eastern Mediterranean is further supported by Homer, who specifically states that the monster dwelt in Lycia, a region distinctly outside ancient Greece. It would be wonderful—not to mention a tremendous boon to the tar pit argument—if Lycia contained tar pits full of fossilized predators, but Lycia does not have any oil or tar pits. Lycia does have interesting geologic features that are worth noting, though. Both Homer and Hesiod say that Chimera had the ability to breathe fire. Homer specifically describes it as “snorting out the breath of the terrible flame.” Intriguingly, Lycia is one of a few places where natural gas slowly leaks out of Earth’s crust to the surface. Today, people light this gas and, because there is a limitless supply seeping out from below, the flame never goes out. Before human mastery of fire, people would have been unable to light this gas, but a single wildfire in the area resulting from a lightning strike, could have changed that in a hurry. Once lit in such a way, the flames would have kept on burning, leading
those who discovered them to wonder what could cause fire, with seemingly no source, to burn for such a long time.

For traders and travelers coming from communities along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Lycia was on the way to Greece. Grains, copper, iron, dates, and wine all migrated along Greek and Phoenician trade routes that started where Israel and Syria are today and hugged the southern Turkish coastline. Some traders would have undoubtedly stopped for rest and resupply in Lycia. Did those who saw strange mixtures of bones in stinking blackened petroleum-filled rocks in the Middle East make a connection with the stench of burning petroleum gas at Lycia and bring the two elements together in the form of the fire-breathing Chimera? The possibility is a tantalizing one. Certainly the initial discovery of strange-looking bones and flames leaping out of the earth all on their own must have scared the hell out of people. The ingredients were there for the birth of a monster, but there is even more to fear in the creature when deeply seated psychological tendencies are taken into consideration.

At its core, Chimera is an aberration, a creature that deviates from normal biology in an extreme way. Make no mistake, it likely arose from fears of the unexplainable features that people were finding in the natural world, but it endured because these natural observations led to the imagining of something quite horrible. Chimera’s weird blend of animals made it a vile sight to behold, and science is now suggesting that humans may be hardwired to react negatively to its alien body structure.

A topic of frequent discussion among researchers who study human mate selection and health is symmetry. A number of studies over the years have explored how people view others with perfectly symmetrical faces and faces that are somewhat asymmetrical. It turns out that people associate symmetrical faces with increased
health and are more attracted to them. In contrast, asymmetrical features are seen negatively.

Growths that make one part of the face become deformed, mutations that cause people to develop six fingers on one hand, wounds, jagged scars, and malformed spines that cause one shoulder to become significantly higher or lower than the other are all, sadly, viewed with various levels of distaste. The evolutionary reasons for this are widely thought to be associated with fitness. Like all animals, humans are driven to reproduce with partners who will help them have lots of healthy children. If a potential partner has numerous scars and/or malformations, these could be associated with poor reflexes, a weak immune system that has allowed the person to suffer from considerable disease, past episodes of malnutrition, or bad genes. Thus, the evolutionary argument goes, we view these traits negatively because they hint that a potential partner carries genes that we don’t want to mix with our own. This negative view of asymmetricality is not limited to attraction; it has spilled over into popular culture and become associated with overall “badness.” This is why villains like the six-fingered man in
The Princess Bride
and the lion Scar in
The Lion King
are so often associated with these sorts of characteristics. In fact, their names
are
their deformity, because the negative essence of the trait represents them so completely.