Page 11 - The Restless Earth Fossils

10 Fossils

Griffins: Mythological

Beasts or Dinosaurs?

From as early as 675 B.C., Greek travelers told tales of strange, lion-
sized beasts called griffins that possessed huge, hooked beaks not
unlike those of an eagle. They supposedly lived in the rugged desert
country of central Asia near the Altai Mountains of what is now
Mongolia. Adrienne Mayor, in her book The First Fossil Hunters, relates
that Aelian, a learned compiler of facts and knowledge concerning
natural history in the early A.D. third century, wrote, “The Bactrians
say that griffins guard the gold of those parts, which they dig up and
weave into their nests. . . .”
Griffins, Mayor contends, represent the first attempt to under-
stand and reconstruct dinosaur fossils.

Griffins (left) are
considered to be one
of the first attempts
by humans to
understand dinosaur
fossils—such as those
of the Protoceratops
(opposite page), the
fossils of which were
mistaken to be that
of the mythological
griffin.

RE_Fossils2print.indd 10 3/17/09 8:58:29 AM