Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.
I’ve read a couple books on this actually, thats exactly what happened. Also cyclops are from looking at bones from a certain type of baby elephant. The giant note hole and tiny eyes made it look like a single eye.
Yep, can confirm! And what’s even funnier to me is that back in the dark ages, Greek people used to find a lot of prehistoric bear skeletons – and those look exactly like human skeletons, except they’re like eight feet tall or something – so they naturally assumed those were the heroes of legend, and made armour and clothes for them and reburied them with the most splendid and sacred religious ceremonies they could think of? Fast forward five centuries, Athens’ all modern and rational, philosophers and scientists aren’t taking any shit from anyone – but the problem is, people will randomly find graves containing giant-ass warriors, so that’s something that can’t be explained away and yeah, demigods were a thing and yeah, they used to be eight feet tall and sorry I don’t make the rules.
Some scientists suspect that the origin of the cyclops myths came about because of elephant skulls, which are vaguely human in shape but with a honking big hole in the middle for the trunk but easily mistakable for an eye socket without any flesh
These hypotheses are heavily debated so I want to be clear when posting that this is in no way 100% fact.
…but I also want to add that the dinosaur Protoceratops or similar genera are hypothesized by folk scientist Adrienne Mayor to have been partially responsible for the griffin myth.
(via wikipedia commons)
I mean, yeah, I can sorta see how someone could mistake that for some half-bird, half-mammal beast, especially with incomplete remains that fossils almost always have as well as the lack of knowledge of what a dinosaur is.
Whether or not it’s true? Who really knows at this point, but it’s fun to think about.
Adrienne Mayor has a book out called The First Fossil Hunters on this exact topic if anyone is interested. I haven’t read it myself though so I couldn’t tell you how good or bad it is!
Part of me, reading this: those are some super cool theories, and sound fairly plausible too – and the reburied bears thing is hilarious
A much larger part of me: I see you trying to convince me that dragons never existed, and i call bullshit
