ur and feathers, hooves and claws. The head of a giant eagle, the body of a regal horse. The flying, trotting, weasel-eating hippogriff of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a mythical beast invented not by J.K. Rowling but by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (seen at right) in his 1515 epic, Orlando furioso. It was a kind of joke; since at that time "crossing a griffin with a horse" was a metaphor for something impossible or ridiculous. By placing exactly such a creature in his story, Ariosto had positioned himself firmly in the land of lighthearted make-believe.
What's interesting about this literary conceit is that the griffin (or gryphon—"hooked one" in the original Greek) is another mythical creature, with the head and wings of an eagle and the hindquarters of a lion. But for the joke to work—for the hippogriff to be sillier than the griffin—the High Renaissance Italians must have considered the griffin to be a real animal, like the horse. These are the same people who gave us Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and the microscope, so their mommas were definitely not raising dummies. So what gives? Why would such intelligent people believe in such an obviously ridiculous creature?
The short answer is, because the classical Greek historian Herodotus told them so, and Herodotus was (and for the most part still is) considered an infallible authority. Herodotus traveled the known world, meticulously documenting what he saw and heard in each country, and today his observations are confirmed and reconfirmed by linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence. He has never been caught in a major error, and, interestingly, he never claims to have seen a gryphon himself. So this begs the question: Why did he believe it? And the answer again is an appeal to authority: The Greeks had numerous detailed and credible reports from Scythian nomads, describing not only the size and appearance of the creature but also its feeding and nesting habits, and even its geographic range, which was limited mainly to Asia's Gobi desert, especially near gold deposits. Having interviewed the Scythians directly, Herodotus had no reason to disbelieve them, any more than he would dismiss reports of the African rhinoceros, which he had also never seen. Fortunately, this leads us to our final question in the chain: Why did the Scythians make these incredible claims?
The answer, surprisingly enough, may be that the gryphon was a real creature, studied and cataloged by careful observers well versed in zoology, anatomy and animal husbandry. They just didn't realize it was extinct.
The many species of origins
Adrienne Mayor, an author and classical literature scholar, has spent a decade combing through ancient writings with the eyes of a fossil hunter. Certainly fossils are common in many regions of the world, and this must have been true in classical times as well. Can we really believe the ancient naturalists never noticed? According to Mayor, griffinlike creatures can be found decorating the pottery of the Near East as early as 3000 BC.
The winged griffin appears only in later embellishments; in the oldest reports and images, the original gryphon was explicitly known as a wingless quadruped. The animal was believed to be warm-blooded, even though the reports insisted it was also an egg layer. And this is very interesting indeed, because there are two species of warm-blooded dinosaur, which modern naturalists call Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus, that laid eggs and were about the size and build of a lion. They also had sharp, birdlike beaks, and a bony frill behind the head like the one depicted in the most ancient gryphon paintings.
In fact, these are two of the commonest fossil types in Asia, and in the all-preserving sands of the Gobi Desert—known for its deposits of gold dust and nuggets—their skeletons are often found intact on the surface, sometimes still sitting on a nest of petrified eggs. Indeed, with a few days of searching, it's not difficult to find specimens buried suddenly by some Cretaceous sandstorm, still upright in fiercely lifelike poses.
There's really nothing to suggest that the animals have been resting there, undisturbed, for tens of millions of years, so the ancient Scythians can be forgiven for assuming a more recent origin. Indeed, after a fourth or eighth or 20th sighting it wouldn't be any great stretch to imagine the hills were full of eagle-faced lions, and that people or animals who went missing in the dunes had become unwilling gryphon chow.
Old, old-school science
In this light, we can admire the Scythians for accurately deducing the nature and lifestyle of a creature they had never personally met. Except for their lack of geological dating techniques, these ancient naturalists—far from being liars or fantasists—were every bit as competent as the paleontologists of today. In my own opinion, they may even have been right in saying that gryphons lined their nests with gold, which they guarded fiercely. We don't know of any direct evidence to support this claim, but that doesn't mean we should doubt the Scythian observations. Indeed, the male bower bird today behaves exactly this way, collecting shiny objects (especially blue ones) to line its nest, in hopes of attracting a discerning female. If dinosaurs and birds are as closely related as the paleontologists have insisted, then a gold-gathering dinosaur in a gold-rich region is entirely plausible.
Nor were gryphons the only "mythical" creatures known from the fossil record. Many dragon skeletons described in antiquity match the features of extinct mammals and dinosaurs. Indeed, until the 20th century the Chinese name for any fossil was "dragon bone," even if the fossil was clearly from some other creature, such as a deer or fish. Myths of the Gorgon—a monster that could turn people or animals to stone—probably also have their origins in ancient fossil beds, where animals have indeed been petrified. The Greeks in particular had a habit of unearthing wooly mammoth bones—common along the north Mediterranean—and assembling them as gigantic (if somewhat grotesque) humanoids. These deposits were known as "heroes' bones," and almost certainly spawned the classical Greek belief that their ancestors had been much larger and stronger, and that the world was shrinking and winding down like some sort of weary clockwork mechanism. Not a bad theory, given the available evidence.
All this just goes to support the opinion, often expressed here, that ancient peoples were surprisingly literal in their reporting of events and circumstances. The art of science fiction was rarely practiced in a world where food, war and disease were the primary concerns! Distortions do of course creep in over time, as the stories are handed down over and over again, from generation to generation and from culture to culture, but as the evidence continues to pile up I suspect we'll find that almost every myth and legend in the ancient world has its roots in the truth.
But there's a cautionary tale here as well, because it's clear from their writings that many of the Greek and Roman philosophers were interpreting the fossil record with uncanny insight. They had deduced that fossils were the very old remains of once-living creatures—literally as old as the hills that contained them. Plato even observed that the human species was ancient, and related to other species more ancient still, while 300 years later the Roman writer Lucretius explained that species could evolve and become extinct under a sort of natural selection—there was no other plausible way to interpret these "giants in the Earth." This insight was lost after the fall of Rome, though, and not recovered until 1,400 years later. Indeed, it's a point of view that has powerful enemies even today, who would probably bury it if they could. But alas, knowledge, unlike bone, doesn't harden into stone when abandoned. We've got to keep teaching it, over and over again, forever. That's science, baby.
Sources used for writing this column can be found here.
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently Lost in Transmission. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available in paperback.
