On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (6 page)

These cultural convergences regarding the morphology and environment of the griffins suggest that more than fable held this monster together. The regions between the Altai and Tien Shan mountains are extremely rich in fossil deposits, and in the 1920s the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews began searching this region after hearing Chinese folklore about dragons’ teeth and bones. He discovered massive fields of windblown strata with the skeletons of late Cretaceous dinosaurs strewn over the landscape. Perhaps the most eerie sight was a giant nesting ground of Protoceratops, with juvenile skeletons and even fossilized egg clutches.
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Andrews was the first to dig out over one hundred Protoceratops from this land, but if Adrienne Mayor is correct, Andrews was not the first to discover these bones; they were regularly picked up and examined by ancient Scythian nomads between 800
BCE
and 300
CE
. A skeleton of a Protoceratops, and especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur (also found in the Dzungarian basin), looks exactly as you might imagine a gryph skeleton to look. Mayor summarizes the matter:

The most common remains, including eggs and young, are of the Protoceratops (ceratops means “horned head”). This creature appears to combine
the features of a mammal and bird of prey in a striking way. The body is about seven or eight feet long, and resembles that of a carnivore, but the skull has a powerful beak. The large nostrils and eye sockets and the knobs and frills of protoceratopsids (and distinct skulls, beaks, and giant claws of other dinosaur species) may explain the features of the archaic images of the gryps (and might account for some other unidentified animals in Scythian art).

A skeleton of a Protoceratops, especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur found in the Dzungarian basin, looks exactly as you might imagine a griffin skeleton. Attempts to make sense of dinosaur fossils certainly stimulated monster speculations in the ancient world. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a sketch by Albrecht Dürer.

Russian archaeologists excavating throughout the first half of the twentieth century discovered more than one hundred ancient gold mines in this area of Central Asia, some dating back to 1500
BCE
. Mayor and Michael
Heaney speculate that nomads and traders sifted these areas for gold for centuries, regularly stumbling on the skeletons of frightening creatures that seemed to have perished in a series of large-scale battles with their neighbor enemies, the mythical one-eyed Arimaspeans. For the nomads, this would constitute a very plausible story for how these animals became extinct, or how they came to be absent in current times.

This raises an interesting point about extinction in general. Today, living on the other side of Darwin, we dig monsters out of the ground all the time and have theoretical concepts such as evolution and extinction to make perfect sense out of why we don’t see monsters walking among us anymore. But the intellectual landscape of ancient Greece was quite different from our own, and ideas such as evolution were marginal. So how, generally, did the ancients understand the monstrous bones they discovered? Were the creatures really extinct? Were the bones representative of species or just isolated giant individuals? Did these creatures continue to live on elsewhere, in distant lands?

Pliny the Elder gives us an idea of how the ancients viewed fossils in his account of a giant skeleton found near Joppa (present-day Tel Aviv), interpreted to be the skeleton of a huge Triton, a kind of merman.
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He seems quite confident that Tritons exist and reports that Emperor Tiberius was assured of their existence by ambassadors from Olisipo (Lisbon). He adds credibility to his belief in Tritons by invoking “two illustrious knights” who witnessed, near Gades (Cadiz, Spain), the giant mermen climbing onto the sides of ships to sit, occasionally capsizing boats in the process. These bones caused quite a stir when brought to the imperial capital. “The bones of this monster, to which Andromeda was said to have been exposed, were brought by Marcus Scaurus from Joppa in Judaea during his aedileship and shown at Rome among the rest of the amazing items displayed. The monster was over 40 feet long, and the height of its ribs was greater than that of Indian elephants, while its spine was 1 and 1/2 feet thick.”
⁸

We have additional evidence that the ancients were aware of and intrigued by giant fossils (Miocene and Pleistocene mammals), but of course they didn’t have a modern concept of such vanished species or a concept of geological time. Suetonius (69–130
CE
) tells us in
Lives of the Caesars
that Caesar Augustus liked to display fossils in his home: “His own villas, which were modest enough, he decorated not so much with handsome statues and pictures as with terraces, groves, and objects noteworthy
for their antiquity and rarity; for example, at Capreae the monstrous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called the ‘bones of the giants,’ and the ‘weapons of the heroes.’”
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The Cyclops legend was fueled by ancient Greek misinterpretations of mastodon skulls found in Mediterranean caves. Pencil drawing and collage by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

It’s not entirely clear whether the ancients conceived of their monsters as extinct species.
¹⁰
The examples above suggest that the creatures were believed to be rare but not entirely gone. One wonders, for example, if the exaggerated three-horned monster that Alexander faced at the sweet water lake (called an Odontotyrannus or “tooth-tyrant”) was a fantasy based on the author’s encounter with a fossil skull. The Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel (1875–1945) argued in 1914 that the Greek myths of the Cyclopes were grounded in people’s encounters with fossil elephant
skulls, which are plentiful in Mediterranean coastal caves. The large nasal cavity in the center of the skull looks very much like the eye socket of a giant creature.

In a world relatively unexplored and so much larger than it is now, it would be quite reasonable to conclude that dinosaur-like creatures were living in India and other far-off, mysterious places. In fact, naturalists as late as the eighteenth century assumed that the giants whose remains we regularly unearth were still alive in the unexplored regions of the world. Thomas Jefferson, for example, introduced a strange fossil to the scientific community at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in the 1790s;
¹¹
he called it Megalonyx, or “Great Claw.” Jefferson believed that the enormous claw, discovered in a cave in Virginia, must have belonged to a monstrous cat-like creature; modern researchers have identified it as the giant ground sloth. The interesting point for our purpose is that Jefferson did not think the creature was extinct, but rather living somewhere in the uncharted frontier. “In the present interior of our continent,” he suggests, “there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions, if in that climate they could subsist; and the mammoths [mastodons] and megalonyxes who may subsist there. Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North-West, and of its contents, does not authorise us to say what it does not contain.” When he sent Lewis and Clark westward, Jefferson encouraged them to keep a lookout for giant living creatures. Suffice it to say that the ancients were no clearer on this issue than was Jefferson.

The issue is not whether the ancients were more credulous than we are today, but what theories are available and reasonable in a given age. Even today cryptozoology, the study or search for legendary creatures (e.g., the Loch Ness Monster, yeti, chupacabra), is a reasonable venture, albeit marginal and easily lampooned. How much more reasonable and widespread would belief in cryptids be in the ancient world? Wouldn’t monsters qualify as an odious subgroup inside this larger taxon of marvelous beings? Unlike much of today’s science, ancient natural history, together with travelers’ tales, often increased the credibility of monsters. More accurately, natural history, both ancient and modern, tends to live on the boundary line between the credible and the incredible.

Aristotle, a notable skeptic, was
not
particularly skeptical about the existence of a large hairy quadruped called a Bolinthus that fought its enemies
by spraying acid-like excrement great distances.
¹²
He describes a beast that is bigger and stronger than an ox, with a long shaggy mane, that “defends itself by kicking and voiding excrement over a distance of about twenty-four feet.” The excretion is so pungent that it burns the hair off dogs.
¹³
The animal appears to be an embellished version of the European bison. Even a beacon of rationality like Aristotle can seriously entertain marvelous stories from faraway lands.

One of the most important characters in the history of monsterology, Pliny the Elder, also waffled between reflective skepticism and gullibility. As the historian Margaret Robinson puts it, “It was Pliny’s
Natural History
that persisted as the ultimate authority on the subject [of marvelous beasts] for fifteen hundred years.”
¹⁴
His natural history transmitted the ancient beliefs about exotica into the medieval world; St. Augustine referred to him as “a man of great learning.”
¹⁵
But today Pliny is considered more of a scrivener, an unreliable inventory taker, rather than a systematic synthesizer like Aristotle. With a little effort, however, reading his passages reveals some important cultural undercurrents.

As a general rule, Pliny accepted almost everything that was reported to him. He informs us, for example, that eels living in the Ganges River in India grow to be three hundred feet long, and that “King Pyrrhus’ big toe on his right foot cured an inflamed spleen by touch. The story goes that when he was cremated his big toe would not burn along with the rest of his body; it was put in a chest in a temple.”
¹⁶
To the long list of amazing descriptions Pliny adds a monster called the manticore, from the Greek for “man-eater.” This beast is first described by Ctesias, and Aristotle cites the same description in his
History of Animals;
they all believe the creature to live in India. Pliny says it has “a triple row of teeth like a comb, the face and ears of a man, grey eyes, a blood-red color, a lion’s body, and inflicts stings with its tail like a scorpion. The manticore has a voice that sounds like a pan-pipe combined with a trumpet, achieves great speed and is especially keen on human flesh.”
¹⁷

It’s hard to imagine something that Pliny would
not
assent to in his considerations of nature, but then, rather surprisingly, he suddenly draws a line. “I am obliged to consider,” he informs us “and with confidence— that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous.” Apparently werewolves cross the line of credibility for Pliny.

In his explanation of the werewolf story, which comes from Arcadia, Pliny unwittingly reveals an interesting criterion for accepting or rejecting a fabulous narrative. Arcadian legend has it that someone chosen by lottery
is led to a marsh. He hangs his clothes on an oak tree and swims naked through the swamp to a deserted territory. “There he is turned into a wolf and associates with other wolves for nine years. If he has avoided contact with a human during that period, he returns to the same marsh, swims across it and regains his shape with nine years’ age added to his former appearance.”
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The story so far is dubious, but not more so than the griffin or the three-hundred-foot eel or the Triton, all of which Pliny reports without editorializing. The giveaway for Pliny is that the werewolf, now returned to human form, actually gets back into the nine-year-old clothes hanging on the oak tree. That really tears it for Pliny, and he sighs, “It is astonishing how far Greek gullibility will go.”