The Beasts that Hide from Man (27 page)

In other words, a scenario featuring, perhaps fittingly, a classic case of Chinese whispers!

THE POSSIBILITY THAT IMAGINARY, FABULOUS ANIMALS of traditional myths and legends have a firm foundation in fact may well seem like a contradiction in terms. As will be revealed here, however, there is all manner of tantalizing evidence and clues on file pointing to the erstwhile physical reality of this elusive, and illusive, fauna of reverie and folklore.

A fearless yet fundamentally tranquil beast, famously reclusive but readily enticed and tamed by the presence of a virginal maiden, and equipped with a spiraled horn capable of exposing and nullifying the most toxic poisons, the unicorn is unquestionably the most celebrated and ethereal of the world’s panoply of fabulous animals. It is also one of the most controversial—due to the surprising diversity of animals allegedly contributing to its origin.

In the fourth century BC, the Greek physician Ctesias recorded the supposed existence in India of a wonderful creature resembling a white ass with blue eyes, and a dark red head whose brow bore an 18-inch-long horn with a pure-white base, jet-black stem, and crimson tip. This variety of unicorn was probably derived from reports of the onager or Asian wild ass
Equus hemionus onager
, combined with distorted accounts of the single-horned great Indian rhinoceros
Rhinoceros unicornis
.

Very different was the white, antelope-like version with cloven hooves supposedly spied at Mecca in 1503 by traveler Vertomannus; this was certainly the Arabian oryx
Oryx leucoryx
, which possesses a pair of long straight horns, and closely resembles a unicorn when observed in profile. Reports of Tibetan unicorns were also based upon an antelope, the chiru
Pantholops hodgsoni;
and Nepal’s equivalents were domestic rams whose horns had been artificially fused into a single, centrally sited horn.

The biblical unicorn or
re em
was actually the European wild ox (aurochs)
Bos primigenius
, a two-horned species that became extinct in 1627. However, in 1934 Maine University biologist Dr. W. Franklin Dove succeeded in creating a “genuine” bovine unicorn—by removing the embryonic horn buds from a day-old Ayrshire bull calf, trimming their edges flat, and then transplanting them side by side onto the center of the calf’s brow. Growing in close contact with one another, they yielded a massive single horn, which proved so successful a weapon that its owner soon became the undisputed leader of an entire herd of cattle. Yet despite his dominance, this unicorn bull was a very placid beast, thus resembling the legendary unicorn not only morphologically but also behaviorally. Coincidence? Perhaps ancient people knew of this simple technique and had created single-horned herd leaders, whose imposing appearance and noble temperament thereafter became incorporated into the evolving unicorn legend.

As for the many unicorn horns (termed alicorns) prized over the years, these have an even more unexpected identity—the ornate, spiralled tusk of the male narwhal
Monodon monoceros
, an unusual species of whale, whose highly prized tusks were obtained when narwhals were harpooned by whalers or when dead narwhals were beached. Washed ashore on Frobisher’s Bay, Canada, during the 16th century, and presented to Queen Elizabeth I, one of the most famous alicorns is the seven-foot-long specimen, ornately tipped with silver that forms part of the English Royal Family’s crown jewels.

In April 1700, numerous supposed “unicorn bones” were disinterred from a clay pit on the River Neckar’s bank, near Cannstatt, Switzerland, and were taken to Duke Eberhard Ludwig, who donated some to the City of Zurich. Their long-deceased owner became known as the Schwabian unicorn, but paleontologists eventually revealed that its bones were actually those of a heterogeneous assortment of fossil species (including lions), and its horn was a mammoth’s tusk.

In November 2002, Auckland Harbour customs officers confiscated from an Auckland furniture importer an undeclared crate of ostensibly remarkable items. For the crate, shipped in by him from Indonesia, was found to contain bones that the furniture importer genuinely believed to be from a unicorn! He had brought them, apparently in good faith regarding their identity, as a special Christmas present. When the bones were examined at Auckland Museum, however, they were identified as originating from either a cow or a water buffalo, and had been coated with a thin layer of cement to make them appear fossilized.

Speaking of fossils: it is possible that there was once a bona fide species of fossil unicorn. Approximately one million years ago, a remarkable antelope lived in Europe, known as
Procamptoceras brivatense
. Now extinct, it was notable for the extreme nearness to one another of its two upward-pointing, in-line horns. Indeed, as pointed out by renowned paleontologist Prof. Björn Kurten in his book
The Ice Age
(1972), in life this species’ horn-cores were covered with horny sheaths “that must have been so closely appressed that the animal looked like a unicorn.” Although current fossil evidence suggests that
Procamptoceras
died out before humans reached Europe, if this species did linger here into more recent times and became known to humans, who could say with certainty that it did not influence our ancestors’ development of the unicorn myth?

Perhaps the most fascinating unicorn link of all, however, follows in the wake of an extraordinary recent discovery. In 1992, a radically new species of animal, hitherto wholly unknown to science, was revealed in Vietnam. Now known as the Vu Quang ox
Pseudoryx nghetinhensis
, it is a spindly legged relative of the Asian wild oxen, but with long oryx-like horns that blend into one when the creature is viewed side-on. Probably the earliest form of unicorn is the Orient’s
ki-lin
, reports of which date back as far as 3000 BC. Yet the
ki-lin s
zoological inspiration has never been satisfactorily explained, because Asia did not appear to contain any living species remotely resembling it. As suggested in October 1993 by P.J. Sharp from Edinburgh, however, perhaps it was based upon the Vu Quang ox. How ironic it would be if a “new” animal proved to be the identity of one of the most ancient animals.

Another ancient beast of myth and legend is the griffin—a fabulous monster with the body of a lion but the wings and head of an eagle. It apparently originated in the Levant region, with accounts of griffins from this area dating back more than 4000 years, but later spreading west into Europe. They were well known for their fondness for gold—Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, stated that griffins inhabited the lofty mountain peaks of India, where they dug up gold with which to construct their mighty nests, which in turn were greatly coveted by opportunist gold-hunters. Also highly sought after were their long curved talons, allegedly capable of detecting poison, and many were brought back to Europe during the Middle Ages by crusaders. Sadly, however, they invariably proved to be antelope horns, sold to the crusaders by African entrepreneurs!

Traditionally, zoologists have sought to identify the griffin with a powerful species of vulturine bird of prey called the lammergeier
Gypaetus barbatus;
but in recent times, as with the unicorn, a very novel alternative candidate has been proposed. In 1991, Dr. Adrienne Mayor, a classical scholar from Princeton, New Jersey, noted that the Altai Mountains of central Asia, famous for their rich gold deposits and the locality of many ancient griffin legends, also contain the fossilized skeletons and eggs of a lion-sized quadrupedal dinosaur called
Protoceratops
, whose most distinctive feature is its strikingly eagle-like beaked head. Dating from the Cretaceous Period (136 million to 64 million years ago), if its remains had been encountered by early gold prospectors many centuries before the correct identity of dinosaurs was recognized, how would they have been explained by such people? Quite possibly as the skeletons of four-footed eagle-headed monsters—or, as we call them today, griffins.

Closely allied (if not directly ancestral) to the griffin, and sometimes termed the cynogriffin, is the senmurv (“dog-bird”) of early Persian mythology, which combines the body of a lion, and the wings and talons of an eagle, with the head of a dog. Its home was a magical tree, whose seeds, scattered throughout the world whenever the senmurv alighted in its mighty branches, cured diseases and evils of every kind. Later Persian legends transformed the senmurv into a huge, resplendent bird known as the simurgh, which nested on the highest peak of northern Persia’s Alburz Mountains, and was permanently hidden from mortal view behind a shimmering veil of darkness and light. Nevertheless, this supposedly unseen bird was frequently, and lavishly, portrayed in ancient bestiaries and manuscripts—a paradoxical situation that incited one short-tempered scholar long ago to pen the following terse but apt comment in the margin of an exquisite plate depicting the simurgh in a 13th century bestiary: “Thou fool, if nobody has seen the simurgh, then how dost thou portray it?”

Folklorists consider it most likely that the simurgh was based upon one or more of the large vultures and eagles native to Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, and its “evolution” was probably also influenced by Arabian myths of the enormous roc or rukh, a gargantuan bird of prey that could carry elephants aloft in its huge talons and inhabited an unspecified island in the Indian Ocean. Fronds from the exceptionally large palm tree
Sagus ruffia
were once believed to be the feathers of the roc. Moreover, giant subfossil eggs of the now-extinct flightless elephant bird
Aepyornis maximus
, shown to European sailors when they first began to visit the island of Madagascar a few centuries ago and able to hold two gallons of fluid, were originally assumed to be roc eggs. And indeed, it is certainly possible, notwithstanding its flightlessness, that the elephant bird, which stood over nine feet tall and may have survived until the late 1600s, inspired early tales of the imaginary roc.

No mythical animal is more famous (infamous?) or more widespread among the world’s legends and folklore than the ferocious dragon, in all its many diverse forms and guises. However, humanity’s erstwhile belief in such monsters was probably inspired at least in part by encounters with real animals, such as giant monitor lizards like Salvadori’s monitor
Varanus salvadorii
from New Guinea, which can attain lengths of up to 15 feet, or the slightly shorter but much bulkier Komodo dragon
V komodoensis
, whose ever-flicking vivid red tongue could have been readily transformed by the boundless talents of human imagination into flickering flames of fire. Some large lizards, moreover, are semi-aquatic, and these, together with crocodiles, might well have inspired fables of amphibious water dragons.

Also, in bygone, pre-paleontological days, uneducated people encountering the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals erroneously assumed that they were the mortal remains of dragons. There is little doubt, for example, that medieval legends of a long-necked, long-winged dragonet inhabiting Mount Pilatus in Switzerland drew their inspiration from the numerous fossilized pterodactyls discovered in this mountain’s rocks.

Fossilized dinosaur remains in Asia have also been proposed as the origin of the ancient Eastern belief in dragons. Back in 1916, J. O’Malley Irwin suggested that the spectacular remains of long-necked sauropod dinosaurs such as
Camarasaurus (=Morosaurus)
discovered by him and others in China may well have inspired this land’s traditional dragon legends. And the remains of fossil human teeth here were commonly thought to be dragon teeth.