SKULL STORIES

Continuing with a tried and tested formula, here is another photograph from my favourite weird museum in downtown San Antonio. Skulls of the three largest land animals; the rhino, elephant and hippo, repose side by side on a table at the Buckhorn Museum. However, once again, the image sparked the imagination of young Freeman...

"In times past the skull and bones of extinct megafauna have been interpreted as belonging to dragons, giants and other legendary beasts.

According to legend a dragon haunted Klagenfurt (the ford of lament) until it was killed by the Duke of Carinthia who used a bull's carcass studded with iron spikes as bait. The dragon’s skull was unearthed in 1353 and put on display in the town hall. I was not until 1840 that palaeontologist Franz Unger identified it as the skull of a woolly rhinoceros.

Apollonis of Tyana, a first century traveller records Asia as being full of dragons both in the mountains and swamps. The monsters had gemstones in their heads. He wrote of seeing many dragon skulls preserved in ‘Paraka’ (probably modern Peshawar).

What he may have seen were fossil skulls of large animals such as the 25 foot crocodile Leptorrhynchus crassidens and the extinct giraffes Sivatherium giganteum. The bone may well have been replaced by selenite crystals giving rise to the idea of precious stones in the beast’s heads.

Another legendary beat, the griffon may have it’s origins in even older fossils.

Folklorist and science historian Adrienne Mayor suggests that fossil skeletons of Protoceratops and other beaked dinosaurs, found by ancient Scythian nomads who mined gold in the Tian Shan and Altai Mopuntains of Central Asia, may have given rise to stories of the griffin. Griffins were described as lion-sized quadrupeds with large claws and a eagle-like beak; they laid their eggs in nests on the ground.

Greek writers began describing the griffin around 675 B.C., at the same time the Greeks first made contact with Scythians. Griffins were described as guarding the gold deposits in the arid hills and red sandstone formations of the wilderness. The region of Mongolia and China where many Protoceratops fossils are found is rich in gold runoff from the neighboring mountains, lending some credence to the theory that these fossils were the basis of griffin myths.

Another Greek myth was that of the Cyclops, a race of one eyed giants, the most famous of which, Ployphemus, was tackled by the hero Odysseus. The notion of one eyesd giants may have come from the early descovery of the skulls of fossil pigmy elephants. These cow sized creaures live on a number of Mediterranean islands including Cyprus, Malta, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, the Cyclades Islands and the Dodecanese Islands. The skull is vaugley human-shaped and the tusks were mistaken for fangs. The nasal opening in the elepghant’s skull, were the trunk muscles attach, looks, to the layman like a huge eye socket.

Dinosaur bones may have given rise to the idea that Chinese dragon shed and regrow their bones along with their skin. Dinosaur bones were ground up and used as medicine, the dragon being a sacred animal in China. Different coloured bones were used to make medicine for dfferent parts of the body. In 1916 Irwin J O’Mally and he British Consul M Hewlett were shown a dragon skeleton at a cave called Shen K’a Tzu (the holy shrine) along the Ichang Gorge. His description of the 70 foot skeleton is transparently that of a sauropod dinosaur