First published 2000
Ancient Greeks and Romans regularly discovered massive fossilized bones in their territories. They collected these petrified remains, displayed them in temples and museums, and created detailed explanations for what they found. Adrienne Mayor demonstrates that classical mythology grew directly from these early fossil discoveries. Scythian gold miners traveling through the Gobi Desert encountered Protoceratops skeletons and other dinosaur remains scattered across the ground. Their accounts of these findings became the foundation for griffin legends. Greeks and Romans developed sophisticated theories about the extinct creatures whose bones they unearthed. They measured specimens, attempted reconstructions, and theorized about why these ancient beings had vanished. Mayor documents how mythological stories served as vehicles for expressing paleontological concepts. The detailed Greek and Roman records of giant bone discoveries, long dismissed as pure fantasy, actually reflect accurate observations of prehistoric remains. This research reveals that ancient peoples practiced a form of paleontology centuries before the modern science emerged.
Genres: history, science, archaeology, non-fiction, ancient-history
Vibes: thought-provoking
Tropes: academic, historical
Setting: Gobi Desert, Greece, Rome
Period: Ancient
384 pages · Hardcover · Princeton University Press