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People have always thrilled to tales of monsters. | 0:00:08 | 0:00:12 | |
But there is nothing in myth that can compare for sheer wonder | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
with creatures from Tyrannosaurs to Woolly Mammoths that once actually existed. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:21 | |
Today, we know life on this planet evolved over many millions of years | 0:00:21 | 0:00:26 | |
and we have some idea at least of how prehistoric creatures once actually looked. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:31 | |
But such knowledge is comparatively recent. | 0:00:31 | 0:00:33 | |
When people in the past came across the fossilised bones | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
of large, vanished animals, it begged any number of questions. | 0:00:39 | 0:00:43 | |
What sort of creatures could they possibly have come from? | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
How old were these skeletal remains? | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
Above all, perhaps, what did they mean? | 0:00:49 | 0:00:52 | |
Just like us, ancient peoples were fascinated by the giant bones | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
they found in the ground. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:00 | |
Like us, they obsessed about their origins. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
In this programme, I'm going to explore the ways in which our ancestors sought to make sense | 0:01:05 | 0:01:10 | |
of the remains of dinosaurs and other giant prehistoric creatures. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:15 | |
And how they tried to reconcile such finds | 0:01:15 | 0:01:17 | |
with their own understanding of life on earth. | 0:01:17 | 0:01:21 | |
That these explanations were wrong doesn't mean that they deserve our contempt. | 0:01:22 | 0:01:26 | |
Just the opposite. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:28 | |
Science begins in wonder | 0:01:28 | 0:01:30 | |
and a yearning to fathom what may at first seem unfathomable. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:34 | |
In that sense, at any rate, our ancestors did have something of the palaeontologist about them. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:39 | |
And in one fundamental respect, they were absolutely spot on. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:44 | |
Monsters had indeed once trodden the earth. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:48 | |
I made this, er, masterpiece when I was five. Looking at it now | 0:01:55 | 0:02:00 | |
I think, well, I was never going to cut it as a sculptor. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:04 | |
But I do remember the intensity of yearning. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:09 | |
A kind of love, really, that went into the making of it. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:14 | |
How desperately I wanted to see a dinosaur. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:19 | |
Going out from my garden, the most exotic thing I could hope to see was a cow. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:25 | |
But if I shut my eyes, I could imagine | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
there was a long-necked Brachiosaur, reaching higher than the trees. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:34 | |
A horned and crested Triceratops, making the fields shake. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:39 | |
And, of course, if I was feeling particularly ghoulish... | 0:02:39 | 0:02:43 | |
..a blood be-slathered Tyrannosaur. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:48 | |
Why was the present day so dull? | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
Why didn't I live in a world full of swamps and pterosaurs, | 0:02:52 | 0:02:56 | |
and perpetually exploding volcanoes? | 0:02:56 | 0:02:59 | |
Why couldn't my life be Mesozoic? | 0:03:04 | 0:03:07 | |
And in a way, all my prayers have been answered. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:11 | |
35 years too late for my seven-year-old self, | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
but visit a museum today, | 0:03:15 | 0:03:16 | |
and the displays have never been more...animatronic. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:20 | |
Nor for 65 million years has flesh been put more convincingly | 0:03:22 | 0:03:27 | |
on the bones of dinosaurs like this Tyrannosaurus Rex. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:31 | |
CGI - the dinosaur lover's best friend. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:40 | |
Now the truth is, of course, | 0:03:45 | 0:03:47 | |
that no human being has ever seen a living dinosaur. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:50 | |
This is the Peabody Museum in New Haven, | 0:03:51 | 0:03:54 | |
on the East Coast of the United States. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
It contains this fabulous mural, painted in the 1940s. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:03 | |
Dinosaurs first appear here around 230 million years ago. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:09 | |
And they last another 160 million years, right the way up to there | 0:04:09 | 0:04:13 | |
where...no more dinosaurs. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:16 | |
Of course, there are no humans anywhere in this mural. | 0:04:17 | 0:04:21 | |
Homo sapiens didn't appear on Earth for another 65 million years. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:26 | |
But always, and it's certainly not just me who has it, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
that yearning in the imagination. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
That desire to know what these extraordinary creatures | 0:04:33 | 0:04:37 | |
had truly looked like. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:39 | |
And perhaps that's why, | 0:04:40 | 0:04:42 | |
in the kind of science fiction story to which I was addicted as a boy, | 0:04:42 | 0:04:46 | |
our prehistoric ancestors are always being shown alongside dinosaurs. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
Total fantasy, of course. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:52 | |
But still, it made me wonder. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:54 | |
When cavemen came across the bones of dinosaurs, | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
what did they make of them? | 0:05:00 | 0:05:02 | |
It's an abiding mystery. By definition, they wrote nothing down. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
But there were some prehistoric peoples, for all that, | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
who survived into historic times. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:11 | |
Take North America, for instance, where hunter-gather tribes | 0:05:13 | 0:05:17 | |
that for generations had been roaming the Great Plains, | 0:05:17 | 0:05:20 | |
had long observed fossilised bones weathering out of the rocks | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
and invented stories to explain them. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:26 | |
Adrienne Mayor is a historian of ancient fossil-hunting, | 0:05:28 | 0:05:31 | |
with a high regard for scientific abilities of the native peoples | 0:05:31 | 0:05:35 | |
who lived in America before Columbus. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
Peoples who, by and large, were pre-literate, pre-historic. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:42 | |
Their theories and their speculations and their myths, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:48 | |
oral traditions, preserved in oral traditions over generations, | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
over thousands of years, they were based on observation over time. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
They knew anatomy. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:56 | |
They compared, they tried to imagine the creatures while alive, | 0:05:56 | 0:06:02 | |
how they behaved, what they looked like, what kind of habitat. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:05 | |
They actually had a sense of deep time. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
They had a sense of different ages on the earth, | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
past ages before the appearance of present-day humans. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:15 | |
Each age characterised by different fauna and flora. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:20 | |
Different land forms. | 0:06:20 | 0:06:21 | |
These are all prototypes of modern science, | 0:06:21 | 0:06:26 | |
although they were all in mythological language. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:28 | |
Even in the 19th century, by which point bone-hunting, | 0:06:30 | 0:06:34 | |
or palaeontology, had become an all-American obsession, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
these Stone Age myths were still being re-told. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
And among those pricking up their ears were scientists | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
such as Othaniel Charles Marsh, | 0:06:44 | 0:06:47 | |
the first director of the Peabody Museum. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:50 | |
Marsh was one of the first great palaeontologists | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
and a genuine pioneer. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:55 | |
He rode shotgun on the Great Plains. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
He hung out with Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull, | 0:06:58 | 0:07:01 | |
and he was adopted as a blood-brother by the Sioux. | 0:07:01 | 0:07:04 | |
Wicasa Pahi Huhu, they called him. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:07 | |
He Who Digs Up Bones. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
Many of the dinosaurs in the Peabody were dug up in the 1870s, | 0:07:12 | 0:07:17 | |
a time when the West really was very wild. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
Among the collection | 0:07:21 | 0:07:23 | |
are the first specimens ever found of iconic species | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
like Stegosaurus, and Apatosauraus, | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:32 | |
Marsh's expeditions took him to the Badlands. | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
There, in his hunt for fossils, | 0:07:40 | 0:07:42 | |
he was drawing on the very latest in scientific research. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:46 | |
But some of his sources were altogether more prehistoric. | 0:07:46 | 0:07:51 | |
The Sioux, and other Native American peoples too, | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
told stories of mysterious beasts, supernatural creatures, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:59 | |
whose bones might be found scattered across the ground. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:04 | |
But what had prompted these legends? | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
From the Sioux, Marsh learned the legend of Thunder Horses, | 0:08:07 | 0:08:12 | |
creatures that galloped over storm clouds | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
and made them echo with the crashing of their hooves. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
His fascination with such stories helped to win him the trust of native Americans. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:25 | |
In 1874, at a time of great tension, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:28 | |
when the whites were encroaching on their lands, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:31 | |
Marsh was able to employ a Sioux as his guide. | 0:08:31 | 0:08:33 | |
He learned about some impressive bones found by the tribe. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
They said they were from strange creatures | 0:08:39 | 0:08:41 | |
that had once lived in the land of the Sioux. | 0:08:41 | 0:08:43 | |
Bones now turned to stone. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:47 | |
Marsh was shown the bones of this magnificent beast. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:50 | |
A colossal mammal, some 12 feet long, | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
which had lived around 35 million years ago, | 0:08:53 | 0:08:56 | |
and was indeed, amazingly enough, a relative of the horse. | 0:08:56 | 0:09:00 | |
This is the very specimen that was shown to Marsh | 0:09:01 | 0:09:04 | |
and, in honour of the legends of the Thunder Horse told him by the Sioux, | 0:09:04 | 0:09:09 | |
he named the creature a Brontotherium - a Thunder Beast. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:14 | |
Most intriguing of all, perhaps, | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
were the tales told across the Great Plains not of Thunder Horses | 0:09:19 | 0:09:23 | |
but of Thunder Birds. | 0:09:23 | 0:09:25 | |
Stories passed down the generations and still retold today. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:29 | |
Long, long ago, when the two-leggeds were new to walking on Mother Earth, | 0:09:30 | 0:09:37 | |
the Thunder Birds were their friends and advisors. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
They were great beasts, with wingspans as long as two war canoes. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:48 | |
They had sharp pointed beaks with sharp pointed teeth | 0:09:48 | 0:09:54 | |
and they lived in the sky, on the edge of the clouds. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:58 | |
Many of these legends tell how the Thunder Birds | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
had as their deadliest enemies giant aquatic monsters. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:07 | |
Now, at this same time | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
lived the Water Monsters. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
They were huge, | 0:10:14 | 0:10:17 | |
shaped like a snake with feet. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
They had a big horn on their head, | 0:10:20 | 0:10:23 | |
and spikes on the tip of their tail. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:25 | |
It's surely suggestive that the stories often derive from regions of America which once, | 0:10:27 | 0:10:33 | |
back in the age of the dinosaurs, were indeed covered by seas. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:38 | |
Nowadays, the Great Plains consist of weathered sediment, | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
complete with the skeletons of long-necked marine reptiles called Plesiosaurs and Pterosaurs. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:48 | |
Flying reptiles of the kind | 0:10:48 | 0:10:50 | |
that were always carrying off Raquel Welch. | 0:10:50 | 0:10:52 | |
And what do we find in Marsh's collection? | 0:10:52 | 0:10:56 | |
A Plesiosaur. | 0:10:56 | 0:10:58 | |
And a Pterosaur. A Pteranodon. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
What all this suggests is an intriguing possibility. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
Almost all of the tribes had stories about water monsters | 0:11:07 | 0:11:11 | |
and sky creatures, Thunder Birds. | 0:11:11 | 0:11:13 | |
And, of course, these are personified violent forces of nature. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:19 | |
Thunder and lightning, very powerful, forces of nature, | 0:11:19 | 0:11:24 | |
and then flooding which was supposedly caused by water monsters. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:28 | |
And when they found very large bones, | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
fossilised bones of extinct creatures | 0:11:32 | 0:11:35 | |
eroding and weathering out of river banks and lake shores, | 0:11:35 | 0:11:39 | |
they naturally thought they must have been water creatures. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:43 | |
And when they also found fossilised shells and fish and turtles, | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
they understood that this land had once been underwater. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:51 | |
Now, it's not only on the Great Plains of America | 0:11:52 | 0:11:55 | |
that we find evidence for a fascination on the part of | 0:11:55 | 0:11:58 | |
pre-literate societies with the bones of vanished creatures. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:02 | |
Go back far enough in time, | 0:12:02 | 0:12:05 | |
and you find it on the opposite side of the Atlantic as well. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
In Greece. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
First and greatest of the Greek poets was Homer. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:17 | |
But the two poems he wrote down some 2,800 years ago, | 0:12:17 | 0:12:21 | |
the Iliad and the Odyssey, | 0:12:21 | 0:12:23 | |
almost certainly contain material far older than that. | 0:12:23 | 0:12:26 | |
Perhaps, then, even before the time of Homer himself, | 0:12:28 | 0:12:32 | |
people were telling the story | 0:12:32 | 0:12:34 | |
of one of the most celebrated monsters in all Greek mythology. | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
The story, well, it's a thriller. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
The hero Odysseus, in his wanderings across the wine-dark sea, | 0:12:41 | 0:12:45 | |
finds himself trapped in a cave by a hideous monster. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:48 | |
A monster that snacks on human flesh | 0:12:48 | 0:12:51 | |
and has, in its forehead, just a single, circular eye. | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
It's a Cyclops. | 0:12:55 | 0:12:57 | |
ROAR | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
What is the trapped Odysseus to do? | 0:13:02 | 0:13:05 | |
Well, he gets the Cyclops drunk. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:07 | |
Then he and his men take a large spike. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:11 | |
They aim it over the Cyclops's single eye. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:15 | |
In goes the spike. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:17 | |
Splat goes the eye. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:19 | |
ROAR | 0:13:19 | 0:13:21 | |
Who could doubt the truth of such a story, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
when there was evidence of the tale to be found in the earth? | 0:13:24 | 0:13:28 | |
Now, of course, this isn't actually the skull of a one-eyed monster. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:35 | |
It's the skull of an elephant, | 0:13:35 | 0:13:37 | |
and this is the large nasal opening from which its trunk once extended. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:42 | |
The Greeks didn't become familiar with real live elephants until the fourth century BC, | 0:13:43 | 0:13:49 | |
long after the story of the Cyclops first emerged. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
But we know from the fossil record | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
that prehistoric species of elephant lived on Mediterranean islands | 0:13:57 | 0:14:02 | |
long before humans were around. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:04 | |
When Ancient Greeks came across | 0:14:06 | 0:14:08 | |
the preserved fossil skulls of these creatures, eroded from the rocks, | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
or perhaps dug up by a farmer, | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
did they mistake the outsize skull for a giant's head? | 0:14:14 | 0:14:18 | |
And the large nasal cavity as a huge single eye-socket? | 0:14:18 | 0:14:23 | |
Is this what inspired Homer's tale | 0:14:25 | 0:14:28 | |
of the island-dwelling giant Cyclops? | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
Now, no ancient source directly confirms the Cyclops theory, | 0:14:31 | 0:14:36 | |
but it seems eminently plausible nevertheless. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
Not only were there large bones to be found | 0:14:39 | 0:14:42 | |
scattered across the entire sweep of the Mediterranean, | 0:14:42 | 0:14:45 | |
but we know as well from other legends, | 0:14:45 | 0:14:47 | |
from the writings of classical authors, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:49 | |
that the Greeks did take an interest in the fossil bones of giant beasts. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:55 | |
On a few occasions, | 0:14:57 | 0:14:58 | |
ancient writers wrote down what they thought of large bones. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:02 | |
They are among the earliest surviving written records of paleontological knowledge. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:07 | |
Take this, from the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:11 | |
"I agree that giants once existed because gigantic bodies | 0:15:13 | 0:15:19 | |
"are revealed all over earth when mounds are broken open." | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
This is the site of what in classical times | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
was one of the most celebrated buildings in the entire Greek world, | 0:15:40 | 0:15:44 | |
the temple of Hera on the Aegean island of Samos. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:47 | |
But it wasn't just its scale and beauty that wowed the Greeks. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:53 | |
It was famous as well for something else - a collection of giant bones. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:59 | |
But where had they come from? | 0:15:59 | 0:16:01 | |
Well, as everyone on Samos knew, their island had been the scene, | 0:16:01 | 0:16:05 | |
way back in ancient times, of a quite spectacular battle. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
One that had been fought between an army of ferocious | 0:16:09 | 0:16:12 | |
female warriors called Amazons, and the god Dionysus. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:15 | |
And what had Dionysus brought with him as back-up? | 0:16:16 | 0:16:20 | |
Nothing less than a war train of elephants. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:24 | |
Panaima, the ancients called the site of this battle - | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
"the Blood-Soaked Field". | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
And its location? | 0:16:41 | 0:16:44 | |
Well, its location seems to have been here. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:47 | |
The soil, which elsewhere on Samos is a dirty white, | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
here, you can see, is the colour of dried blood. | 0:16:52 | 0:16:55 | |
And on either side of it, | 0:16:56 | 0:16:58 | |
hills that are absolutely stuffed with prehistoric elephant bones. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:04 | |
So what that implies is that this site was witness to | 0:17:04 | 0:17:08 | |
an absolutely key event in the history of palaeontology. | 0:17:08 | 0:17:12 | |
The ancients who came across the bones here, and explained them | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
as the remains of elephants, were blazing a trail that would be | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
followed by 18th-century, by 19th-century palaeontologists. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:23 | |
For the very first time, | 0:17:23 | 0:17:25 | |
the fossils of long-lost megafauna were being identified correctly. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:31 | |
Nor was that the limit of ancient Greek paleontological achievement. | 0:17:31 | 0:17:36 | |
Take the evidence on this Corinthian vase from the sixth century BC, | 0:17:36 | 0:17:41 | |
now in a Boston museum. | 0:17:41 | 0:17:43 | |
Here's a brave hero, Heracles, | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
coming to the rescue of Hesione, a princess of Troy, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
who is being menaced by a monster. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:53 | |
Most art historians, specialists of vase painting, | 0:17:53 | 0:17:56 | |
had identified this monster | 0:17:56 | 0:18:00 | |
as a very poorly drawn sea monster peeking out of a cave. To me, | 0:18:00 | 0:18:04 | |
it looked a lot like a fossil skull eroding out of a cliff-side. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:09 | |
You can see that it's disembodied. It has no body. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
So this monster looks the way it does, | 0:18:12 | 0:18:14 | |
not because the artist was rubbish at drawing monsters? | 0:18:14 | 0:18:17 | |
You think that it might actually be The fossil of an actual beast? | 0:18:17 | 0:18:22 | |
Well, if you look at the other figures on the vase, | 0:18:22 | 0:18:25 | |
the humans and the other animals, | 0:18:25 | 0:18:27 | |
they are all very well drawn, and so the artist was actually | 0:18:27 | 0:18:32 | |
a good artist and he has given us a very good rendering of what | 0:18:32 | 0:18:36 | |
a fossil skull would look like as it weathers out of a cliff. | 0:18:36 | 0:18:40 | |
I think the model may have been a Samotherium, | 0:18:40 | 0:18:44 | |
which is a giant giraffe species. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:46 | |
They lived in the Mioscene and they left a lot of fossils. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
In the Aegean, on islands in mainland Greece, | 0:18:49 | 0:18:52 | |
that would be a very common fossil. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:54 | |
Paleontologists notice the large empty eye socket, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:59 | |
the broken-away nasal area which is a very realistic rendition | 0:18:59 | 0:19:04 | |
of a skull that's been in the ground for a long time. The jagged teeth, | 0:19:04 | 0:19:09 | |
the back of the skull, it really matches | 0:19:09 | 0:19:12 | |
what a Samotherium skull looked like. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
This appears to be the oldest surviving | 0:19:15 | 0:19:17 | |
artistic representation of a fossil in Greek art. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:22 | |
So what we have here is an object of absolutely | 0:19:22 | 0:19:24 | |
key significance in the history of paleontology. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:27 | |
I think it's a really powerful evidence that fossils | 0:19:27 | 0:19:30 | |
did influence the way Greeks thought about their myths. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
For it to have been drawn so realistically, | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
the skull must have been in good condition. | 0:19:37 | 0:19:40 | |
But how did the Greeks think it had been preserved like that in rock? | 0:19:40 | 0:19:44 | |
One answer can be found in the story of a second princess | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
rescued from a monster. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:51 | |
This is a book which used to belong to my grandmother, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:55 | |
and if I open it here, | 0:19:55 | 0:19:57 | |
there is a fabulous picture by the Victorian artist Lord Leighton. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:02 | |
And yes, it's true there's a half-naked woman tied to a rock, | 0:20:02 | 0:20:06 | |
but when I first came across this book, | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
back in my grandmother's house, I was still of an age to be far more | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
interested in the fact that here was what seemed to be a dinosaur. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:18 | |
In fact, it's a sea monster, sent to ravage Joppa, | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
in what's now Israel, after the local queen had been | 0:20:21 | 0:20:24 | |
foolish enough to insult Poseidon, the god of the sea. | 0:20:24 | 0:20:27 | |
And the naked woman is Andromeda, the queen's daughter, | 0:20:27 | 0:20:31 | |
who is being offered to the monster in an attempt to calm Poseidon down. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:36 | |
But no need to panic, because here comes the hero Perseus, | 0:20:36 | 0:20:41 | |
armed with a Gorgon's head, | 0:20:41 | 0:20:42 | |
and anyone who looks at the head is immediately turned to stone. | 0:20:42 | 0:20:46 | |
And this, as you can see from the painting, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
is precisely the mistake that the monster has made. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
Andromeda was saved... | 0:20:54 | 0:20:56 | |
and the monster, well, the monster was turned to stone... | 0:20:56 | 0:21:01 | |
just like a fossil. All of which raises an intriguing possibility. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:07 | |
Was the story of the Gorgon's head an attempt by the Greeks | 0:21:07 | 0:21:11 | |
to explain what would otherwise have been inexplicable wonders? | 0:21:11 | 0:21:16 | |
Colossal skeletons fashioned out of rock? | 0:21:16 | 0:21:20 | |
Certainly, one thing is clear. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:23 | |
Giant fossilised monsters, back in Classical times as now, | 0:21:23 | 0:21:27 | |
made for phenomenal box office. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
In 58 BC, when a flamboyant showman | 0:21:31 | 0:21:34 | |
by the name of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
returned home after a spell throwing his weight around in Judea, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:41 | |
he brought with him a giant fossil, which he claimed to have been | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
the very monster turned to stone by Perseus. | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
The monster, we are told, was over 40 feet long, | 0:21:48 | 0:21:52 | |
the height of its ribs was greater than that of an Indian elephant, | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
and its spine was one and a half feet thick. | 0:21:55 | 0:21:59 | |
Now, we have no idea what it was that Scaurus had actually brought back with him - | 0:21:59 | 0:22:04 | |
the fossil of some prehistoric beast, clearly, a giant whale perhaps, | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
or even it may be some composite monster, | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
fashioned out of a whole assortment of fossilised remains. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:16 | |
But of one thing we can be absolutely confident. | 0:22:18 | 0:22:22 | |
It wasn't a dinosaur. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:24 | |
All the giant bones found across the Mediterranean came from mammals. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
Elephants, rhinoceroses, Samotheriums. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
We know this because the rocks that contain them | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
are of relatively recent origin - say eight million years old. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:40 | |
To contain the bones of dinosaurs, they would have had to be | 0:22:40 | 0:22:43 | |
more than eight times that age. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:46 | |
But what about dinosaur remains outside the Mediterranean? | 0:22:49 | 0:22:53 | |
Did the Greeks know anything about them? | 0:22:53 | 0:22:56 | |
Adrienne Mayor thinks they did. And for someone like me, | 0:22:56 | 0:23:00 | |
whose childhood craze for dinosaurs | 0:23:00 | 0:23:02 | |
evolved seamlessly into an obsession with the ancient Greeks, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:06 | |
it's a completely gripping theory. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
The Greeks might have had knowledge of dinosaur remains | 0:23:08 | 0:23:14 | |
if they travelled further east, along the silk routes | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
where there are dinosaur remains, | 0:23:17 | 0:23:19 | |
much further east than the Mediterranean world. | 0:23:19 | 0:23:21 | |
Beyond the land of the Scythians, | 0:23:21 | 0:23:23 | |
a people who inhabited a vast stretch of central Asia, | 0:23:23 | 0:23:27 | |
there rose a steepling chain of mountains. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:31 | |
So reports Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century BC. | 0:23:31 | 0:23:36 | |
And beyond these mountains there exist mysterious creatures | 0:23:36 | 0:23:41 | |
called griffins. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:43 | |
Herodotus reported stories that he heard from the Scythian nomads. | 0:23:43 | 0:23:48 | |
They told him about griffins. Strange creatures with beaks, | 0:23:48 | 0:23:53 | |
four legs, nests on the ground for their eggs, | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
that guarded the gold deposits that the Scythians mined and prospected. | 0:23:56 | 0:24:01 | |
These creatures were fearsome. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:06 | |
They preyed on horses and miners. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
Looking at the way Greeks represented griffins, | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
as in this fine collection on Samos, | 0:24:14 | 0:24:16 | |
you might think that these were fantastical creatures, | 0:24:16 | 0:24:20 | |
the product of over-heated imaginations. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:22 | |
But that was not the understanding of the Greeks themselves. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:27 | |
The early travellers may have been shown fossils of dinosaurs | 0:24:27 | 0:24:31 | |
to support those stories of a beaked creature with four legs, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:35 | |
burrows - nests on the ground near the gold, | 0:24:35 | 0:24:40 | |
guarding the gold, actually. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:42 | |
Now, in the Gobi desert, east of the Altai Mountains, | 0:24:42 | 0:24:47 | |
there stretches one of the richest hunting grounds | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
for dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:53 | |
In 1922, when an American adventurer, | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
a kind of proto-Indiana Jones named Roy Chapman Andrews, | 0:24:58 | 0:25:01 | |
made the first paleontological survey of the region, | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
he and his men were astounded by what they found. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:08 | |
Fossils, he reported, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:10 | |
were strewn over the surface almost as thickly as stones. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:15 | |
The desert was positively paved with bones. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
Most astounding of all, there were nests - nests filled with eggs. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:25 | |
The very first dinosaur eggs ever found. | 0:25:25 | 0:25:28 | |
This film shows the creature who laid them. | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
It was a distant ancestor of one of the most celebrated dinosaurs ever found in the Wild West, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:42 | |
the three-horned living tank Triceratops, | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
and so, perhaps not surprisingly, it was named Protoceratops. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:51 | |
And if it seems to resemble descriptions given by Greek writers of the griffin, | 0:25:51 | 0:25:55 | |
well, perhaps it's not entirely coincidence. | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
And there's further evidence for the link | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
between dinosaur bones and griffins. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
We're told by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the court | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
of the Persian king in the fifth century BC, | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
"griffins are a race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves, | 0:26:10 | 0:26:16 | |
"and with legs and claws like lions." | 0:26:16 | 0:26:18 | |
The Scythians described griffins as combining the features of birds and mammals. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:24 | |
They were attempting to describe accurately | 0:26:24 | 0:26:28 | |
the fossils that they saw, the fossils of dinosaurs, | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
things that they had never seen alive. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:33 | |
And the fossils of the dinosaurs, Protoceratops dinosaurs, | 0:26:33 | 0:26:36 | |
combine the features of mammalian, four-legged creature, a predator, | 0:26:36 | 0:26:41 | |
with the beak of a raptor, or an eagle, or a bird of some sort. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:46 | |
If Mayor's Protoceratops as bird-like monster theory is accurate, | 0:26:46 | 0:26:51 | |
and it's received wide support both from classicists and from palaeontologists, | 0:26:51 | 0:26:55 | |
then it suggests something really rather remarkable. | 0:26:55 | 0:26:59 | |
The mural in the Peabody is called The Age of Reptiles. | 0:27:02 | 0:27:06 | |
It shows us dinosaurs as terrible lizards. | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
But the ancient nomads of Mongolia, it seems, | 0:27:08 | 0:27:12 | |
recognised in Protoceratops not a reptile, but a kind of bird, | 0:27:12 | 0:27:16 | |
which prefigures what is pretty much the consensus of scientists today. | 0:27:16 | 0:27:22 | |
The notion that birds are so closely related | 0:27:22 | 0:27:24 | |
to dinosaurs, that they are in fact a kind of dinosaur themselves, | 0:27:24 | 0:27:28 | |
has been fundamentally shaped by recent discoveries in Asia. | 0:27:28 | 0:27:33 | |
So how haunting it is to see | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
in the fabulously ancient figure of the griffin, | 0:27:35 | 0:27:39 | |
a possible foreshadowing of insights | 0:27:39 | 0:27:42 | |
that embody the absolute paleontological cutting edge. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:46 | |
And just maybe, griffins weren't the only mythical creatures | 0:27:48 | 0:27:52 | |
to have been inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
In China, the figure of the dragon was for millennia | 0:27:56 | 0:28:01 | |
an emblem of the Emperor, and it remains to this day | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
a potent symbol of Chinese identity and culture. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:08 | |
The earliest representations of dragons | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
reach as far back as 6,000 BC. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
Could it be that the fossils of dinosaurs also gave rise to this fabulously enduring creature? | 0:28:17 | 0:28:24 | |
Were dragons ancient China's attempt to explain the mystery of outsized bones, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:29 | |
the bones of dinosaurs such as those that today | 0:28:29 | 0:28:33 | |
are known as Tsintaosaurus, | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
Yangchuanosaurus, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:39 | |
or Sinosauropteryx? | 0:28:39 | 0:28:43 | |
The evidence, as you might expect, is, to put it mildly, | 0:28:43 | 0:28:46 | |
circumstantial. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
All the same, a fascinating demonstration of just how | 0:28:48 | 0:28:52 | |
potent the hold can be of fossils on the Chinese imagination | 0:28:52 | 0:28:56 | |
came to light only a few years ago. | 0:28:56 | 0:28:58 | |
In 2006, in central China, palaeontologists discovered that | 0:29:00 | 0:29:05 | |
the remains of dinosaurs were being dug up and sold as "dragon bones". | 0:29:05 | 0:29:09 | |
900 grams were going for the equivalent of 50p. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:12 | |
Villagers told the palaeontologists that they had been excavating | 0:29:15 | 0:29:18 | |
the seam of fossils for a couple of decades. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:22 | |
But the antiquity of Chinese medical practises suggests that | 0:29:22 | 0:29:26 | |
the attribution of dinosaur bones to dragons | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
may reach very much further back in time. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
Certainly, what we do know is that in China, dragons have been | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
associated with health and good fortune for millennia. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:42 | |
Ancient recipes employing the fossilised bones of large, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:47 | |
prehistoric mammals, and probably dinosaurs too, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
are included in the Chinese Materia Medica - | 0:29:50 | 0:29:52 | |
compendia of centuries-old traditional medicine. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:57 | |
The size of the bones that are recorded in the Materia Medica, | 0:29:57 | 0:30:02 | |
they are clearly large bones and not of ordinary mammals, | 0:30:02 | 0:30:06 | |
and they would have been given tremendous significance in the Materia Medica. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:11 | |
In a culture which believed in the reality of dragons, | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
these large bones were clearly at a premium. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
This is one of the earliest recipes to mention dragon bones, | 0:30:18 | 0:30:22 | |
first recorded in the third century BC. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:26 | |
What you do is that you grind the bones to dust, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:29 | |
and mix them with various herbal medicines. | 0:30:29 | 0:30:33 | |
Then you eviscerate two swallows and you pack the bone, | 0:30:35 | 0:30:39 | |
which is now fine dust, into small bags and place them | 0:30:39 | 0:30:44 | |
inside the swallows and hang them overnight over a well. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:48 | |
Once you have done that, they are magically efficacious. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:53 | |
-So let's put our bag inside and let it boil. -It's like a tea bag. | 0:30:56 | 0:31:01 | |
Like a tea bag. Exactly. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:03 | |
So we're expecting all the essence of these various herbs | 0:31:03 | 0:31:06 | |
to come out of the bag into the surroundings. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:09 | |
Chris Duffin, a historian of geology and folklore, made tea for me | 0:31:09 | 0:31:13 | |
following the ancient recipe, but omitting the eviscerated swallow. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:17 | |
He didn't recommend I drink it, though. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
One of the herbal ingredients - | 0:31:20 | 0:31:22 | |
not the powdered bone - turns out to be highly toxic. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:24 | |
When Huang Di, the First Emperor, | 0:31:29 | 0:31:31 | |
died more than 4,000 years ago, his admirers declared | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
that he had risen into the heavens in the form of a dragon. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
An intriguing thought, | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
that long before scientists gave Tyrannosaurus his surname of 'Rex', | 0:31:42 | 0:31:45 | |
the Latin word for 'King', | 0:31:45 | 0:31:47 | |
royalty and dinosaurs might have been paired up in ancient China. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
Nor was it only in China that big bones were | 0:31:55 | 0:31:58 | |
believed by the ancients to bring good luck. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
The Greeks too, when they weren't listening to travellers' tales about griffins, | 0:32:01 | 0:32:05 | |
might be busy harvesting fossils themselves. | 0:32:05 | 0:32:08 | |
In Greece, giant petrified bones were seen as talismans | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
that might bring power, prestige, even victory in battle. | 0:32:12 | 0:32:17 | |
The best example comes from a war that featured that Tyrannosaur | 0:32:19 | 0:32:23 | |
among the cities of ancient Greece, Sparta. | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
Now, most Greeks, relative to the Spartans, were herbivores. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:31 | |
Which isn't to say they were exactly wusses. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:33 | |
When they marched to battle, they would make a fearsome sight. They would have their shields, | 0:32:33 | 0:32:38 | |
the equivalent of the crest of this Triceratops, | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
and they would use them to make a phalanx, out of which would bristle their spears, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:47 | |
the equivalent of a Triceratops's horns. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
When they met with another city's phalanx, | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
they would charge one another | 0:32:53 | 0:32:57 | |
and shove and gouge and hack | 0:32:57 | 0:33:00 | |
until one side turned and fled. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
But the Spartans were different. | 0:33:06 | 0:33:09 | |
Unlike the warriors of other cities, they were full-time - professional. | 0:33:09 | 0:33:14 | |
The very earth would shake to the rhythm of their metronomic approach. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:19 | |
As they emerged through the dust of battle, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
they would reveal a terrifying wall of scarlet and bronze. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:26 | |
When they charged, | 0:33:26 | 0:33:27 | |
it wouldn't necessarily be a full-frontal attack. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
The Spartans, unlike other Greeks, | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
had the training to launch their wings in a flanking action. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
Their aim - to attack the vulnerable sides of an enemy phalanx | 0:33:38 | 0:33:42 | |
and shred it to pieces. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:45 | |
Their style of battle, I suppose, was like that of a Tyrannosaur. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:49 | |
Not that the Spartans always won. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:07 | |
When, in the early sixth century BC, they sought to conquer | 0:34:07 | 0:34:10 | |
the neighbouring city of Tegea, they suffered a humiliating defeat. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:15 | |
But just like Tyrannosaurs, which often seem to have suffered | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
quite serious wounds and yet invariably come back for more, | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
the Spartans rarely took defeat lying down. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
In the wake of this reverse, | 0:34:27 | 0:34:29 | |
they sent a delegation to Tegea under cover of a truce. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:32 | |
News had reached them of a strange find in a blacksmith's yard - | 0:34:32 | 0:34:36 | |
the spine of a giant skeleton. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:39 | |
No wonder the Spartans were excited. They had been told, you see, | 0:34:39 | 0:34:42 | |
by an oracle, that they would only ever conquer Tegea | 0:34:42 | 0:34:45 | |
if they could first capture a skeleton, | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
the bones of an ancient prince called Orestes. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
Orestes had the kind of dysfunctional family background | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
that the ancient Greeks loved in their heroes. | 0:34:56 | 0:34:59 | |
His mum had killed his dad. He'd killed his mum. Outsize events. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:04 | |
And so who was to say that Orestes had not been outsize as well? | 0:35:04 | 0:35:08 | |
And if he had been on a physically sensational scale, | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
indeed, a giant, | 0:35:11 | 0:35:12 | |
then what else could the skeleton in the blacksmith's yard be, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:15 | |
if not the very bones of the great hero that the Spartans wanted? | 0:35:15 | 0:35:21 | |
All just a bit of a stretch, you might have thought, | 0:35:21 | 0:35:24 | |
except that sure enough, it turned out | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
that the Spartans' hunch had been spot on. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:30 | |
The bones were dug up, smuggled to Sparta, shown off, then re-interred. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:36 | |
Shortly afterwards, | 0:35:36 | 0:35:38 | |
the Tegeans submitted to their mastery of their hated neighbours. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
A resounding triumph for the Spartan military-paleontological complex. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:47 | |
So what was the skeleton? Almost certainly not the bones of Orestes. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:56 | |
We can't be certain, | 0:35:56 | 0:35:58 | |
but the remains most likely belonged to a mastodon, | 0:35:58 | 0:36:01 | |
a large prehistoric kind of elephant, the remains of which | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
were still being dug up around Tegea as late as the 20th century. | 0:36:04 | 0:36:09 | |
All of which makes for a puzzle - why should the Spartans | 0:36:09 | 0:36:13 | |
have presumed that the bones belonged to an ancient hero? | 0:36:13 | 0:36:17 | |
The Greeks, when they contemplated the Earth's ancient past, | 0:36:18 | 0:36:23 | |
conceived of it as an age of giants. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:26 | |
Heroes in particular had been built on a colossal scale. | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
Now, it is true that, for all the restlessness of their curiosity | 0:36:33 | 0:36:37 | |
and the sheer sweep of their metaphysical speculations, | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
they had no real understanding of the vastness of time | 0:36:40 | 0:36:44 | |
that had preceded the appearance of humans on Earth. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:48 | |
What they did have, however, | 0:36:48 | 0:36:49 | |
was a sense that humanity had evolved and changed over time, | 0:36:49 | 0:36:53 | |
albeit not in a way that Darwin would have recognised. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:56 | |
To classical thinkers, it was a fundamental presumption that everything was going to the dogs. | 0:36:56 | 0:37:02 | |
What had once been a golden age was now an age of iron. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:07 | |
The human race, originally a breed of heroes, | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
had degenerated and diminished | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
and ended up literally dwarfish. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:17 | |
And what had served to give the Greeks this particular notion? | 0:37:19 | 0:37:23 | |
Of course, in a sense it's just human nature to presume | 0:37:23 | 0:37:26 | |
that things were better in the good old days. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:28 | |
But the Greeks weren't just drawing on a gut conservatism | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
for their understanding of the distant past. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
They had evidence for it, | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
such as the outsize bones dug up at Tegea by the Spartans. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:41 | |
The people of Samos may have identified the elephant bones on their island correctly | 0:37:43 | 0:37:47 | |
but most Greeks, confronted by a giant fossil, would like as not | 0:37:47 | 0:37:51 | |
believe it to be the remains of some legendary giant hero. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:55 | |
Indeed, so wide-spread was this presumption that the relics | 0:37:57 | 0:38:02 | |
of renowned big-hitters such as Theseus or Ajax | 0:38:02 | 0:38:04 | |
became must-have accessories for any temple keen to make its mark. | 0:38:04 | 0:38:09 | |
Here is one of those venerated giant bones, now recognised | 0:38:11 | 0:38:16 | |
to be part of the femur of an Ice Age Woolly rhinoceros. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
It was dug up in a temple at Nichoria near Sparta. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:24 | |
This is one of only two | 0:38:24 | 0:38:25 | |
fossilised bones of this sort that are known | 0:38:25 | 0:38:31 | |
from Greek sanctuaries. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
-So is a really rare and precious object. -It is indeed. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
It's a very rare discovery. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:41 | |
They would have seen it as a relic, almost certainly of a lost hero. | 0:38:41 | 0:38:47 | |
Very much like the way we see relics of saints, | 0:38:47 | 0:38:52 | |
displayed in reliquaries in churches today. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:57 | |
So it was that fossil bones ended up as tourist attractions | 0:38:57 | 0:39:02 | |
across first the Greek, and then the Roman world. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
Even Caesars might come to gawp. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
The emperor Hadrian, we are told, | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
when a skeleton with kneecaps the size of a discus was exposed | 0:39:12 | 0:39:16 | |
on a beach, "embraced and kissed the bones, and laid them out." | 0:39:16 | 0:39:21 | |
No wonder, then, confronted by such seemingly incontrovertible evidence | 0:39:21 | 0:39:26 | |
for the colossal stature of ancient men, that the Romans | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
should long have clung to their belief in a form of evolution - | 0:39:29 | 0:39:35 | |
"survival of the unfittest". | 0:39:35 | 0:39:37 | |
400 years on from the birth of Christ, | 0:39:40 | 0:39:42 | |
and scholars still clung to it. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:45 | |
"The older the world becomes, so the smaller will be the bodies of men." | 0:39:45 | 0:39:51 | |
The man who spoke these words was Augustine, | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
a brilliant intellectual living in what is now Tunisia, | 0:39:54 | 0:39:58 | |
even as the Roman empire was busy imploding all around him. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:02 | |
Tumultuous though the times were, Augustine didn't let them | 0:40:02 | 0:40:06 | |
distract him from his excitement at the discovery of an elephant tooth. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
Not, however, that Augustine thought that it was an elephant tooth. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:14 | |
In size, as he pointed out, "it was as big as 100 human teeth combined." | 0:40:14 | 0:40:19 | |
No wonder, then, that he should have stated confidently, | 0:40:19 | 0:40:23 | |
"I believe it belonged to some giant." | 0:40:23 | 0:40:26 | |
Living as he did in the fourth century AD, Augustine's take on | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
this mysterious relic, however, was complex. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:35 | |
He had one foot in the waning world of classical culture, | 0:40:38 | 0:40:42 | |
but he was also a Christian, a bishop, a saint. | 0:40:42 | 0:40:46 | |
He knew and loved his Virgil, but he lived to see Rome sacked. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:51 | |
In attempting to explain the mysterious giant's tooth, | 0:40:51 | 0:40:54 | |
he looked backwards to the traditions of the Greeks and the Romans, | 0:40:54 | 0:40:58 | |
but he looked forwards as well, to those of the Middle Ages. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:03 | |
As the gods and heroes of the classical world | 0:41:03 | 0:41:06 | |
faded before the triumph of the Church, so new explanations | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
for the existence of huge fossilised bones took their place. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:15 | |
This time, they were derived from the Bible. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:18 | |
Of course, the scholars of the Middle Ages, | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
like the philosophers and biologists of ancient Greece, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
had no real idea just how ancient life on Earth really was. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:28 | |
But they weren't wholly lacking a notion of a vanished age | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
that had belonged to beings larger and more exotic than themselves. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:37 | |
These creatures, like the heroes of ancient Greece, were human. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:42 | |
Colossally human. | 0:41:42 | 0:41:44 | |
Giants. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:46 | |
But where had these giants gone? | 0:41:49 | 0:41:51 | |
The answer to that, so people in the Middle Ages believed, | 0:41:51 | 0:41:55 | |
was to be found in the greatest cataclysm ever to afflict humanity - | 0:41:55 | 0:41:59 | |
Noah's flood. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:01 | |
Now, the animals may have gone in two by two, | 0:42:02 | 0:42:05 | |
but not everyone got out of the rain. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:07 | |
"There were giants in the earth in those days." | 0:42:07 | 0:42:11 | |
So we're told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
about the world that preceded Noah's flood. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
And sometimes, in the course of exploration or excavation, | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
people would find the bones of these same giants. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:24 | |
Augustine was one of the first, but certainly not the last, | 0:42:25 | 0:42:28 | |
to explain fossils in terms of the Flood. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:31 | |
In 1342, for instance, a cave was discovered in Southern Italy | 0:42:31 | 0:42:36 | |
that contained the skeleton of a man 400 feet tall - | 0:42:36 | 0:42:40 | |
or so we are told by the great medieval writer Boccachio. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:43 | |
"To display their discovery to posterity, the citizens | 0:42:43 | 0:42:47 | |
"of Trapani strung the bones on a wire and carried them to a church." | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
Not every wonder discovered in rock, however, | 0:42:55 | 0:42:58 | |
was to be explained as the relic of a vanished giant. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:02 | |
What, for instance, | 0:43:02 | 0:43:03 | |
were good Christians to make of mysterious footprints like these? | 0:43:03 | 0:43:07 | |
We now know that these bird-like tracks, | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
discovered in Oxfordshire, | 0:43:12 | 0:43:13 | |
were left by the ancestors of carnivorous dinosaurs | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
like Tyrannosaurus. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
But it's no wonder that back in the Middle Ages, when similar prints | 0:43:18 | 0:43:21 | |
were discovered in locations ranging from Poland to the Alps, | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
that some rather diabolical explanations | 0:43:25 | 0:43:28 | |
should have been provided. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:32 | |
"Whence comest thou?" God asks Satan in the Bible. | 0:43:32 | 0:43:36 | |
Back comes the answer, | 0:43:36 | 0:43:38 | |
"From going to and fro in the Earth, and from walking up and down in it." | 0:43:38 | 0:43:44 | |
Indeed, so closely associated with the Devil were the footprints | 0:43:44 | 0:43:48 | |
of prehistoric creatures that it was not unknown for attempts | 0:43:48 | 0:43:52 | |
to be made to neutralise their malign power by incorporating them | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
into the fabric of a church, as here at Bebington in Cheshire. | 0:43:56 | 0:44:00 | |
But Satanic walkabouts weren't the only explanation for dinosaur tracks | 0:44:00 | 0:44:04 | |
that seem to have grown up in the Middle Ages. | 0:44:04 | 0:44:06 | |
As in the East, so in the West, people told tales of dragons. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:12 | |
Those of Europe, however, unlike those of China, were malign, | 0:44:12 | 0:44:17 | |
worthy trophies for a passing hero. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:20 | |
Indeed, dinosaur footprints have been found | 0:44:20 | 0:44:23 | |
beside the Rhine in the very spot traditionally associated | 0:44:23 | 0:44:27 | |
with Fafnir, the gold-guarding dragon slain by Siegfried, | 0:44:27 | 0:44:31 | |
and immortalised in the opera by Richard Wagner. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:36 | |
Nice to think that a dinosaur's plod through a Jurassic swamp | 0:44:36 | 0:44:39 | |
might have contributed to the Ring Cycle. | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
In fact, so vividly did dragons haunt | 0:44:45 | 0:44:47 | |
the imaginations of Germans in the Middle Ages that in 1335, | 0:44:47 | 0:44:52 | |
when this huge skull was dug up | 0:44:52 | 0:44:54 | |
outside the Austrian town of Klagenfurt, | 0:44:54 | 0:44:57 | |
the locals had no doubt what it was. | 0:44:57 | 0:45:00 | |
The story goes that once, back in the earliest days of the town, | 0:45:00 | 0:45:04 | |
a nearby swamp was the haunt of a monstrous serpent... | 0:45:04 | 0:45:08 | |
until a bold knight, as bold knights tended to do | 0:45:08 | 0:45:11 | |
back in those days, decided to take the dragon on. | 0:45:11 | 0:45:15 | |
So what the knight did was he got hold of a cow, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:17 | |
he stuffed it full of quicklime and then he used the cow as bait. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:22 | |
The dragon came roaring down, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:24 | |
devoured the cow, the quicklime ignited, the dragon exploded, | 0:45:24 | 0:45:29 | |
and bang, Klagenfurt had been made safe for civilisation. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:34 | |
Two and a half centuries on from the discovery of the mysterious skull, | 0:45:34 | 0:45:39 | |
and the legend had only improved in the telling. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:43 | |
So much so, that in 1590, the good folk of Klagenfurt were inspired to commission... | 0:45:43 | 0:45:48 | |
this. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:50 | |
Once again, a fossilised bone inspired a fabulous creation, | 0:45:50 | 0:45:54 | |
this time in three dimensions. Which I suppose begs an obvious question. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:59 | |
To what creature had the skull dug up in 1335 actually belonged? | 0:45:59 | 0:46:05 | |
The answer - not a dragon, but a woolly rhinoceros. | 0:46:05 | 0:46:10 | |
And this forlorn spot north of the town was where it breathed its last. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:16 | |
There's a sense, then, in which the sculpture, | 0:46:17 | 0:46:20 | |
fashioned within the lifetimes of Galileo and Francis Bacon, | 0:46:20 | 0:46:23 | |
might seem a last spasm of medieval superstition. | 0:46:23 | 0:46:29 | |
But that, I think, would be unfair. | 0:46:29 | 0:46:31 | |
Yes, it looks back to a time when people believed that dragons | 0:46:31 | 0:46:35 | |
and giants had actually existed. | 0:46:35 | 0:46:38 | |
But it looks ahead as well, | 0:46:38 | 0:46:40 | |
to something that we can almost recognise as modern palaeontology. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:45 | |
This, after all, is not a monster conjured up | 0:46:45 | 0:46:50 | |
purely from the imagination - it constitutes, however inadequately, | 0:46:50 | 0:46:57 | |
the oldest surviving reconstruction of a prehistoric beast. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:02 | |
A century on, and to scholars touched by the dawning rays | 0:47:07 | 0:47:10 | |
of the Enlightenment, | 0:47:10 | 0:47:12 | |
talk of dragons or giants was becoming an embarrassment. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:15 | |
In 1683, when the world's original university museum, the Ashmolean, | 0:47:17 | 0:47:22 | |
first opened its doors in this Oxford building, a mysterious bone | 0:47:22 | 0:47:27 | |
dug up near the village of Cornwell was one of its prize exhibits. | 0:47:27 | 0:47:32 | |
In his book, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, Robert Plot, | 0:47:33 | 0:47:37 | |
the first keeper of the Ashmolean, | 0:47:37 | 0:47:39 | |
tried to work out what the bone had come from. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
First he speculates that it was the bone of an elephant | 0:47:43 | 0:47:46 | |
brought to Britain by the Romans. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:48 | |
And how he actually eliminates this as an option | 0:47:48 | 0:47:50 | |
is in 1676, the year before his book is published, an elephant is | 0:47:50 | 0:47:55 | |
actually exhibited in Oxford as part of a travelling menagerie. | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
And you can imagine Plot going up to the elephant itself | 0:47:58 | 0:48:02 | |
and pulling out his tape measure and measuring it, | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
and actually comparing it to the bone he had in hand. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:08 | |
He determines they're different in shape and size and eliminates that. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:12 | |
He very quickly also eliminates horse and ox as viable candidates | 0:48:12 | 0:48:16 | |
and he concludes in the end, basically with the only, the only | 0:48:16 | 0:48:20 | |
other conclusion that he could draw, was that it was the bone of a giant. | 0:48:20 | 0:48:23 | |
This is the illustration in Plot's book of the mysterious relic. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:28 | |
The original has vanished. | 0:48:28 | 0:48:30 | |
In 1763, when a scholar named Richard Brookes inspected it, | 0:48:30 | 0:48:34 | |
he gave it, in the most up to date scientific style, | 0:48:34 | 0:48:37 | |
an imposing classical name, he called it - what else? - | 0:48:37 | 0:48:41 | |
"Scrotum Humanum". | 0:48:41 | 0:48:44 | |
Now, reflected in this name was the fact that Brookes, | 0:48:44 | 0:48:47 | |
although he knew he wasn't really dealing with a pair of unfeasibly large testicles, | 0:48:47 | 0:48:52 | |
still had no idea what kind of creature his "Scrotum Humanum" | 0:48:52 | 0:48:56 | |
had actually been. | 0:48:56 | 0:48:58 | |
Like the Ancient Greeks, | 0:48:58 | 0:49:00 | |
like the Christians of the Middle Ages, Brookes and his contemporaries | 0:49:00 | 0:49:04 | |
had not the faintest notion of just how ancient the planet truly was. | 0:49:04 | 0:49:10 | |
But all that was about to change, | 0:49:10 | 0:49:12 | |
and fossilised bones, no longer embarrassments, | 0:49:12 | 0:49:16 | |
would be enshrined as prize exhibits in a scientific revolution. | 0:49:16 | 0:49:21 | |
In 1788, a Scottish geologist named James Hutton published an almost | 0:49:23 | 0:49:28 | |
literally epochal book in which he proposed that the Earth | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
was infinitely more ancient than humanity. | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
Indeed, Hutton could find no evidence for there having been a creation at all. | 0:49:34 | 0:49:39 | |
"The result," he declared, "of our present enquiry is | 0:49:39 | 0:49:44 | |
"that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." | 0:49:44 | 0:49:48 | |
The implications of this theory for the study of ancient beasts | 0:49:50 | 0:49:54 | |
were not long in being in felt. | 0:49:54 | 0:49:56 | |
Between 1815 and the early 1820s, | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
a whole series of fossils were uncovered by men quarrying for slate | 0:50:09 | 0:50:13 | |
down mine-shafts like this, at Stonesfield, north of Oxford. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:19 | |
So this narrow, cramped passageway is where slate was mined | 0:50:25 | 0:50:29 | |
for the roofs of Oxford colleges and Cotswold cottages | 0:50:29 | 0:50:33 | |
and it's where in the course of that mining the teeth, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:37 | |
the bones of a mysterious and monstrous beast were found, | 0:50:37 | 0:50:43 | |
and the significance of these finds | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
is precisely that they were made down here underground, | 0:50:46 | 0:50:50 | |
because it meant that the origins of these bones | 0:50:50 | 0:50:56 | |
could be very precisely identified to a particular layer | 0:50:56 | 0:51:01 | |
in the sequence of rocks. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:04 | |
Whatever the creature was that these fossils had come from, | 0:51:04 | 0:51:08 | |
one thing was absolutely clear. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:11 | |
It was old, it was very, very old. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:15 | |
The bones belonged to the same mysterious creature | 0:51:15 | 0:51:19 | |
that Richard Brookes had named "Scrotum Humanum". | 0:51:19 | 0:51:23 | |
But now there was to be no talk of giant's testicles. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
This was because the fragments ended up in the hands of the man | 0:51:27 | 0:51:31 | |
perhaps best qualified in the whole of Britain to identify them. | 0:51:31 | 0:51:35 | |
A clergyman named William Buckland, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:38 | |
who also just happened to be Oxford's Professor of Geology. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:42 | |
What Buckland deduced was that the fossilised bones had belonged | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
to a very carnivorous and very large lizard. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
A Megalosaurus. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
By 1822, the name had appeared for the first time in print. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:59 | |
The animal identified by Buckland | 0:51:59 | 0:52:01 | |
"must in some instances have attained a length of 40 feet, | 0:52:01 | 0:52:05 | |
"and stood eight feet high." | 0:52:05 | 0:52:07 | |
The notion that such a monster might once have wandered | 0:52:07 | 0:52:10 | |
over Oxfordshire was, of course, a thrilling one. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:14 | |
With the remains of other similar giant lizards simultaneously | 0:52:18 | 0:52:22 | |
being found elsewhere across southern England, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
it opened up to the eyes of the public a quite staggering prospect. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
Once, it seemed, in the chillingly unfathomable reaches | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
of a pre-human past, there had existed an entire world | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
of savage reptiles, "red in tooth and claw". | 0:52:38 | 0:52:42 | |
"Time, cruel time. Come and subdue that brow." | 0:52:43 | 0:52:49 | |
Quite how the existence millions upon millions of years ago | 0:52:50 | 0:52:55 | |
of ravening Megalosaurs was to be squared with a Biblical chronology | 0:52:55 | 0:52:59 | |
that had man being fashioned by a loving God on the sixth day of Creation, | 0:52:59 | 0:53:04 | |
was for theologians, a most unexpected and alarming poser. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:10 | |
Buckland was merely the first of many clergymen | 0:53:10 | 0:53:13 | |
to wrestle with the implications. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
Certainly, the discovery of so many fossils opened a vista | 0:53:16 | 0:53:20 | |
of monsters to the wide eyes of the Victorian public | 0:53:20 | 0:53:23 | |
that compared with anything in the Bible | 0:53:23 | 0:53:25 | |
or Greek mythology. | 0:53:25 | 0:53:27 | |
"Dragons of the prime", as the great poet Tennyson put it, | 0:53:30 | 0:53:33 | |
"that tare each other in the slime." | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
Except, of course, that "dragons" was precisely what they were not. | 0:53:37 | 0:53:43 | |
The scientist who came up with a name for them was this man, | 0:53:43 | 0:53:47 | |
Richard Owen. | 0:53:47 | 0:53:49 | |
When he wasn't busy founding the Natural History Museum in London | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
and being quite sensationally rude to all his colleagues, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
Owen had a day job as Britain's leading anatomist. | 0:53:55 | 0:53:59 | |
Megalosaurus, and creatures like it, he announced, | 0:53:59 | 0:54:03 | |
had ranked not merely as lizards, but as "terrible lizards". | 0:54:03 | 0:54:07 | |
In Greek, dinosaurs. | 0:54:07 | 0:54:11 | |
The name reflected the two sides of Owen's complex personality - | 0:54:11 | 0:54:15 | |
the brilliant anatomist who had correctly extrapolated from a few scattered bones | 0:54:15 | 0:54:21 | |
an entire kingdom of vanished creatures, and the devout Anglican, | 0:54:21 | 0:54:26 | |
awestruck before the revelation of just how stupefying | 0:54:26 | 0:54:30 | |
God's creations had always been. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
Nor was Owen alone in his wonder. | 0:54:34 | 0:54:36 | |
Within a decade of his first use of the word, | 0:54:37 | 0:54:40 | |
dinosaurs had become a veritable craze. | 0:54:40 | 0:54:42 | |
In 1854, Owen himself and an associate, | 0:54:44 | 0:54:47 | |
the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, blazed what would prove | 0:54:47 | 0:54:51 | |
a popular trail. They opened a dinosaur theme park. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:55 | |
And here it still stands - Crystal Palace in south London. | 0:54:55 | 0:55:00 | |
When Hawkins explained his motives for sculpting this Mesozoic wonderland, | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
he did so in words that not only foreshadow Jurassic Park, | 0:55:18 | 0:55:23 | |
but also echo the myth-making of our ancestors. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:25 | |
His aim, he declared, was "the reviving of the ancient world, | 0:55:25 | 0:55:31 | |
"to call up from the abyss of time and from the depths of the Earth, | 0:55:31 | 0:55:35 | |
"those vast forms and gigantic beasts which the Almighty Creator | 0:55:35 | 0:55:40 | |
"designed to inhabit and precede us in possession of this part of the Earth called Great Britain." | 0:55:40 | 0:55:45 | |
No wonder, then, that he and Owen | 0:55:47 | 0:55:49 | |
wanted to include this particular beauty. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
So what we have here is none other than Megalosaurus itself. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:59 | |
Except that, as palaeontologists have long appreciated, | 0:55:59 | 0:56:03 | |
it actually looked nothing like this. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
Megalosaurus was not built like a people-carrier. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:10 | |
In point of fact, it was a theropod, a two-legged proto-Tyrannosaur. | 0:56:10 | 0:56:15 | |
Which means that it looked like... this. | 0:56:15 | 0:56:19 | |
And that's why, when I was a child, I made a point of refusing | 0:56:19 | 0:56:23 | |
every offer from my parents to take me to Crystal Palace. | 0:56:23 | 0:56:27 | |
These reconstructions offended every last bone in my dino-geek body. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:33 | |
But now that I'm here, I can realise what a little prig I was being. | 0:56:39 | 0:56:44 | |
This model built of concrete may not be cutting-edge palaeontology, | 0:56:45 | 0:56:50 | |
but it tells you everything about why dinosaurs still fascinate us. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:54 | |
About the sense of awe and smallness we feel | 0:56:55 | 0:56:58 | |
when we contemplate the immensity of geological time, | 0:56:58 | 0:57:01 | |
and about how extraordinary it is, considering the millions | 0:57:01 | 0:57:05 | |
upon millions of years that separate us from the Mesozoic, | 0:57:05 | 0:57:08 | |
that we know anything about dinosaurs at all. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:11 | |
The achievements of palaeontology, ever since the heroic | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
pioneering days of Buckland and Owen, | 0:57:14 | 0:57:16 | |
have certainly been astounding. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
And recent finds, especially in China, | 0:57:19 | 0:57:21 | |
have opened up new worlds of wonder and fascination. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:26 | |
But there is perhaps a sense, after all, in which | 0:57:26 | 0:57:30 | |
we are not so wholly far removed from those who saw in fossils | 0:57:30 | 0:57:35 | |
the remains of Thunder Birds, or griffins, or giants, or dragons. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:41 | |
Our understanding of dinosaurs today is defined for us | 0:57:41 | 0:57:45 | |
by the discoveries of scientists. | 0:57:45 | 0:57:48 | |
And yet, the nature of the fossil record being what it is, | 0:57:49 | 0:57:54 | |
those same scientists will never be able to fill in all the gaps. | 0:57:54 | 0:57:58 | |
And so it is, into those same gaps, that we, | 0:57:58 | 0:58:02 | |
just as our ancestors did, project all our manifold obsessions, | 0:58:02 | 0:58:07 | |
as variable and contradictory as human society itself. | 0:58:07 | 0:58:10 | |
It turns out that the science fiction stories were right all along. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:16 | |
Just when you think you've got dinosaurs pinned down, | 0:58:16 | 0:58:19 | |
they always break free. | 0:58:19 | 0:58:21 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:45 | 0:58:48 | |
Email [email protected] | 0:58:48 | 0:58:51 |