Mayor The First Fossil Hunters

Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
With a New introduction by the author
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3844-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythology

Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants—these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact—in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.

As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground.

Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mayor, Adrienne

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

FrontMatter, pg. i
CONTENTS, pg. vii
ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2011 EDITION, pg. xiii
GEOLOGICAL TIME SCALE, pg. 1
Introduction, pg. 3
Historical Time Line, pg. 11
CHAPTER 1. The Gold-Guarding Griffin: A Paleontological Legend, pg. 15
CHAPTER 2. Earthquakes and Elephants: Prehistoric Remains in Mediterranean Lands, pg. 54
CHAPTER 3. Ancient Discoveries of Giant Bones, pg. 104
CHAPTER 4. Artistic and Archaeological Evidence for Fossil Discoveries, pg. 157
CHAPTER 5. Mythology, Natural Philosophy, and Fossils, pg. 192
CHAPTER 6. Centaur Bones: Paleontological Fictions, pg. 228
APPENDIX 1. Large Vertebrate Fossil Species in the Ancient World, pg. 255
APPENDIX 2. Ancient Testimonia, pg. 260
Notes, pg. 283
Works Cited, pg. 333
Index, pg. 351

Über Autor(innen)

Adrienne Mayor’s books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Fossil Legends of the First Americans (both Princeton). She is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford University.