As a kid, who didn't want unicorns or dragons to exist? I dedicated large portions of my childhood to finding these mythical creatures in the woods behind my house, but I never had any luck. I still remember all the kids at school laughing at me and telling me that dragons and unicorns aren't real. There's no quicker way to crush an 18-year-old's innocence, I can tell you.
I could've saved a lot of time if I'd only gone to the Field Museum in Chicago's exhibit "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids," I could've saved a lot of time. The exhibit uses fossils, preserved specimens, recreated models, and ancient artifacts to explain how the mythical imagination grew around the fossil record. Ancient Greeks who unearthed skulls of dwarf elephants (pictured) on Mediterranean islands mistook the cavity in the center for a single eye hole — voila, the myth of the Cyclops is born.
(Click through for more pictures of fossils-turned-myths at the Field Museum).
Giant Birds. Arab traders use to tell stories of an island that hosted birds so big they could lift elephants into the sky. Inspiration likely came from the aepyornis, one of the biggest birds to ever exist, which lived on Madagascar. It stood over ten feet tall and laid two-gallon eggs, and they went extinct in the late 16th century. It probably never came into contact with elephants, but still, that's a huge omelette.
Bigfoot. Gigantopithecus — an enormous ape that lived in Southeast Asia as recently as 300,000 years ago — stuck around for perhaps a million years or more. That's plenty of time to birth all kinds of bigfoot/wild-man-of-the-woods stories we still hear about today. If I had a dime for all the times I get called "bigfoot"....I'd have a dime.
Dragons. This woolly rhinoceros skull was kept in the town hall of Klagenfurt, Austria, where elders insisted it was a dragon slain before the town's founding. Thank god they took care of that before putting in Ye Olde Potterye Barne.
Unicorns. European unicorns could have been inspired by the narwhal, a horned whale, which certainly takes some creativity. But without that old-world creativity, 7-year-old girls wouldn't have stickers for their trapper keepers. This unicorn head hung above a German apothecary in the late 1700s, and the owners had the tact to go classy and make sure their diorama's horn was actual narwhal.
Griffins. Griffins, in addition to being hi-larious comediennes, were powerful beasts of old famed for having an eagle's head and wings pasted onto a lion's body. It could've been inspired when miners in southeastern Europe encountered the fossils of the protoceratops, a beaked, four-legged dinosaur, almost 2,000 years ago.
More information on the Field Museum's "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids" exhibit can be found here.
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