Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters


Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters

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People have always thrilled to tales of monsters.

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But there is nothing in myth that can compare for sheer wonder

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with creatures from Tyrannosaurs to Woolly Mammoths that once actually existed.

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Today, we know life on this planet evolved over many millions of years

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and we have some idea at least of how prehistoric creatures once actually looked.

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But such knowledge is comparatively recent.

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When people in the past came across the fossilised bones

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of large, vanished animals, it begged any number of questions.

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What sort of creatures could they possibly have come from?

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How old were these skeletal remains?

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Above all, perhaps, what did they mean?

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Just like us, ancient peoples were fascinated by the giant bones

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they found in the ground.

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Like us, they obsessed about their origins.

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In this programme, I'm going to explore the ways in which our ancestors sought to make sense

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of the remains of dinosaurs and other giant prehistoric creatures.

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And how they tried to reconcile such finds

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with their own understanding of life on earth.

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That these explanations were wrong doesn't mean that they deserve our contempt.

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Just the opposite.

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Science begins in wonder

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and a yearning to fathom what may at first seem unfathomable.

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In that sense, at any rate, our ancestors did have something of the palaeontologist about them.

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And in one fundamental respect, they were absolutely spot on.

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Monsters had indeed once trodden the earth.

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I made this, er, masterpiece when I was five. Looking at it now

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I think, well, I was never going to cut it as a sculptor.

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But I do remember the intensity of yearning.

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A kind of love, really, that went into the making of it.

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How desperately I wanted to see a dinosaur.

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Going out from my garden, the most exotic thing I could hope to see was a cow.

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But if I shut my eyes, I could imagine

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there was a long-necked Brachiosaur, reaching higher than the trees.

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A horned and crested Triceratops, making the fields shake.

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And, of course, if I was feeling particularly ghoulish...

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..a blood be-slathered Tyrannosaur.

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Why was the present day so dull?

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Why didn't I live in a world full of swamps and pterosaurs,

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and perpetually exploding volcanoes?

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Why couldn't my life be Mesozoic?

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And in a way, all my prayers have been answered.

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35 years too late for my seven-year-old self,

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but visit a museum today,

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and the displays have never been more...animatronic.

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Nor for 65 million years has flesh been put more convincingly

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on the bones of dinosaurs like this Tyrannosaurus Rex.

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CGI - the dinosaur lover's best friend.

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Now the truth is, of course,

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that no human being has ever seen a living dinosaur.

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This is the Peabody Museum in New Haven,

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on the East Coast of the United States.

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It contains this fabulous mural, painted in the 1940s.

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Dinosaurs first appear here around 230 million years ago.

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And they last another 160 million years, right the way up to there

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where...no more dinosaurs.

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Of course, there are no humans anywhere in this mural.

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Homo sapiens didn't appear on Earth for another 65 million years.

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But always, and it's certainly not just me who has it,

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that yearning in the imagination.

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That desire to know what these extraordinary creatures

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had truly looked like.

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And perhaps that's why,

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in the kind of science fiction story to which I was addicted as a boy,

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our prehistoric ancestors are always being shown alongside dinosaurs.

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Total fantasy, of course.

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But still, it made me wonder.

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When cavemen came across the bones of dinosaurs,

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what did they make of them?

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It's an abiding mystery. By definition, they wrote nothing down.

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But there were some prehistoric peoples, for all that,

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who survived into historic times.

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Take North America, for instance, where hunter-gather tribes

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that for generations had been roaming the Great Plains,

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had long observed fossilised bones weathering out of the rocks

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and invented stories to explain them.

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Adrienne Mayor is a historian of ancient fossil-hunting,

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with a high regard for scientific abilities of the native peoples

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who lived in America before Columbus.

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Peoples who, by and large, were pre-literate, pre-historic.

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Their theories and their speculations and their myths,

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oral traditions, preserved in oral traditions over generations,

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over thousands of years, they were based on observation over time.

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They knew anatomy.

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They compared, they tried to imagine the creatures while alive,

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how they behaved, what they looked like, what kind of habitat.

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They actually had a sense of deep time.

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They had a sense of different ages on the earth,

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past ages before the appearance of present-day humans.

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Each age characterised by different fauna and flora.

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Different land forms.

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These are all prototypes of modern science,

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although they were all in mythological language.

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Even in the 19th century, by which point bone-hunting,

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or palaeontology, had become an all-American obsession,

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these Stone Age myths were still being re-told.

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And among those pricking up their ears were scientists

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such as Othaniel Charles Marsh,

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the first director of the Peabody Museum.

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Marsh was one of the first great palaeontologists

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and a genuine pioneer.

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He rode shotgun on the Great Plains.

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He hung out with Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull,

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and he was adopted as a blood-brother by the Sioux.

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Wicasa Pahi Huhu, they called him.

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He Who Digs Up Bones.

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Many of the dinosaurs in the Peabody were dug up in the 1870s,

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a time when the West really was very wild.

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Among the collection

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are the first specimens ever found of iconic species

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like Stegosaurus, and Apatosauraus,

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the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus.

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Marsh's expeditions took him to the Badlands.

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There, in his hunt for fossils,

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he was drawing on the very latest in scientific research.

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But some of his sources were altogether more prehistoric.

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The Sioux, and other Native American peoples too,

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told stories of mysterious beasts, supernatural creatures,

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whose bones might be found scattered across the ground.

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But what had prompted these legends?

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From the Sioux, Marsh learned the legend of Thunder Horses,

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creatures that galloped over storm clouds

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and made them echo with the crashing of their hooves.

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His fascination with such stories helped to win him the trust of native Americans.

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In 1874, at a time of great tension,

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when the whites were encroaching on their lands,

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Marsh was able to employ a Sioux as his guide.

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He learned about some impressive bones found by the tribe.

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They said they were from strange creatures

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that had once lived in the land of the Sioux.

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Bones now turned to stone.

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Marsh was shown the bones of this magnificent beast.

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A colossal mammal, some 12 feet long,

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which had lived around 35 million years ago,

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and was indeed, amazingly enough, a relative of the horse.

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This is the very specimen that was shown to Marsh

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and, in honour of the legends of the Thunder Horse told him by the Sioux,

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he named the creature a Brontotherium - a Thunder Beast.

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Most intriguing of all, perhaps,

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were the tales told across the Great Plains not of Thunder Horses

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but of Thunder Birds.

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Stories passed down the generations and still retold today.

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Long, long ago, when the two-leggeds were new to walking on Mother Earth,

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the Thunder Birds were their friends and advisors.

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They were great beasts, with wingspans as long as two war canoes.

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They had sharp pointed beaks with sharp pointed teeth

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and they lived in the sky, on the edge of the clouds.

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Many of these legends tell how the Thunder Birds

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had as their deadliest enemies giant aquatic monsters.

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Now, at this same time

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lived the Water Monsters.

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They were huge,

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shaped like a snake with feet.

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They had a big horn on their head,

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and spikes on the tip of their tail.

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It's surely suggestive that the stories often derive from regions of America which once,

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back in the age of the dinosaurs, were indeed covered by seas.

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Nowadays, the Great Plains consist of weathered sediment,

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complete with the skeletons of long-necked marine reptiles called Plesiosaurs and Pterosaurs.

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Flying reptiles of the kind

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that were always carrying off Raquel Welch.

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And what do we find in Marsh's collection?

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A Plesiosaur.

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And a Pterosaur. A Pteranodon.

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What all this suggests is an intriguing possibility.

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Almost all of the tribes had stories about water monsters

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and sky creatures, Thunder Birds.

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And, of course, these are personified violent forces of nature.

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Thunder and lightning, very powerful, forces of nature,

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and then flooding which was supposedly caused by water monsters.

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And when they found very large bones,

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fossilised bones of extinct creatures

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eroding and weathering out of river banks and lake shores,

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they naturally thought they must have been water creatures.

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And when they also found fossilised shells and fish and turtles,

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they understood that this land had once been underwater.

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Now, it's not only on the Great Plains of America

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that we find evidence for a fascination on the part of

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pre-literate societies with the bones of vanished creatures.

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Go back far enough in time,

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and you find it on the opposite side of the Atlantic as well.

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In Greece.

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First and greatest of the Greek poets was Homer.

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But the two poems he wrote down some 2,800 years ago,

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the Iliad and the Odyssey,

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almost certainly contain material far older than that.

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Perhaps, then, even before the time of Homer himself,

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people were telling the story

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of one of the most celebrated monsters in all Greek mythology.

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The story, well, it's a thriller.

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The hero Odysseus, in his wanderings across the wine-dark sea,

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finds himself trapped in a cave by a hideous monster.

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A monster that snacks on human flesh

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and has, in its forehead, just a single, circular eye.

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It's a Cyclops.

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ROAR

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What is the trapped Odysseus to do?

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Well, he gets the Cyclops drunk.

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Then he and his men take a large spike.

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They aim it over the Cyclops's single eye.

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In goes the spike.

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Splat goes the eye.

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ROAR

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Who could doubt the truth of such a story,

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when there was evidence of the tale to be found in the earth?

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Now, of course, this isn't actually the skull of a one-eyed monster.

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It's the skull of an elephant,

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and this is the large nasal opening from which its trunk once extended.

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The Greeks didn't become familiar with real live elephants until the fourth century BC,

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long after the story of the Cyclops first emerged.

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But we know from the fossil record

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that prehistoric species of elephant lived on Mediterranean islands

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long before humans were around.

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When Ancient Greeks came across

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the preserved fossil skulls of these creatures, eroded from the rocks,

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or perhaps dug up by a farmer,

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did they mistake the outsize skull for a giant's head?

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And the large nasal cavity as a huge single eye-socket?

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Is this what inspired Homer's tale

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of the island-dwelling giant Cyclops?

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Now, no ancient source directly confirms the Cyclops theory,

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but it seems eminently plausible nevertheless.

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Not only were there large bones to be found

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scattered across the entire sweep of the Mediterranean,

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but we know as well from other legends,

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from the writings of classical authors,

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that the Greeks did take an interest in the fossil bones of giant beasts.

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On a few occasions,

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ancient writers wrote down what they thought of large bones.

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They are among the earliest surviving written records of paleontological knowledge.

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Take this, from the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus.

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"I agree that giants once existed because gigantic bodies

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"are revealed all over earth when mounds are broken open."

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This is the site of what in classical times

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was one of the most celebrated buildings in the entire Greek world,

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the temple of Hera on the Aegean island of Samos.

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But it wasn't just its scale and beauty that wowed the Greeks.

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It was famous as well for something else - a collection of giant bones.

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But where had they come from?

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Well, as everyone on Samos knew, their island had been the scene,

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way back in ancient times, of a quite spectacular battle.

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One that had been fought between an army of ferocious

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female warriors called Amazons, and the god Dionysus.

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And what had Dionysus brought with him as back-up?

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Nothing less than a war train of elephants.

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Panaima, the ancients called the site of this battle -

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"the Blood-Soaked Field".

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And its location?

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Well, its location seems to have been here.

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The soil, which elsewhere on Samos is a dirty white,

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here, you can see, is the colour of dried blood.

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And on either side of it,

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hills that are absolutely stuffed with prehistoric elephant bones.

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So what that implies is that this site was witness to

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an absolutely key event in the history of palaeontology.

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The ancients who came across the bones here, and explained them

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as the remains of elephants, were blazing a trail that would be

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followed by 18th-century, by 19th-century palaeontologists.

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For the very first time,

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the fossils of long-lost megafauna were being identified correctly.

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Nor was that the limit of ancient Greek paleontological achievement.

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Take the evidence on this Corinthian vase from the sixth century BC,

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now in a Boston museum.

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Here's a brave hero, Heracles,

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coming to the rescue of Hesione, a princess of Troy,

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who is being menaced by a monster.

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Most art historians, specialists of vase painting,

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had identified this monster

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as a very poorly drawn sea monster peeking out of a cave. To me,

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it looked a lot like a fossil skull eroding out of a cliff-side.

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You can see that it's disembodied. It has no body.

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So this monster looks the way it does,

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not because the artist was rubbish at drawing monsters?

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You think that it might actually be The fossil of an actual beast?

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Well, if you look at the other figures on the vase,

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the humans and the other animals,

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they are all very well drawn, and so the artist was actually

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a good artist and he has given us a very good rendering of what

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a fossil skull would look like as it weathers out of a cliff.

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I think the model may have been a Samotherium,

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which is a giant giraffe species.

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They lived in the Mioscene and they left a lot of fossils.

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In the Aegean, on islands in mainland Greece,

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that would be a very common fossil.

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Paleontologists notice the large empty eye socket,

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the broken-away nasal area which is a very realistic rendition

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of a skull that's been in the ground for a long time. The jagged teeth,

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the back of the skull, it really matches

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what a Samotherium skull looked like.

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This appears to be the oldest surviving

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artistic representation of a fossil in Greek art.

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So what we have here is an object of absolutely

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key significance in the history of paleontology.

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I think it's a really powerful evidence that fossils

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did influence the way Greeks thought about their myths.

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For it to have been drawn so realistically,

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the skull must have been in good condition.

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But how did the Greeks think it had been preserved like that in rock?

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One answer can be found in the story of a second princess

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rescued from a monster.

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This is a book which used to belong to my grandmother,

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and if I open it here,

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there is a fabulous picture by the Victorian artist Lord Leighton.

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And yes, it's true there's a half-naked woman tied to a rock,

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but when I first came across this book,

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back in my grandmother's house, I was still of an age to be far more

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interested in the fact that here was what seemed to be a dinosaur.

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In fact, it's a sea monster, sent to ravage Joppa,

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in what's now Israel, after the local queen had been

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foolish enough to insult Poseidon, the god of the sea.

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And the naked woman is Andromeda, the queen's daughter,

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who is being offered to the monster in an attempt to calm Poseidon down.

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But no need to panic, because here comes the hero Perseus,

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armed with a Gorgon's head,

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and anyone who looks at the head is immediately turned to stone.

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And this, as you can see from the painting,

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is precisely the mistake that the monster has made.

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Andromeda was saved...

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and the monster, well, the monster was turned to stone...

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just like a fossil. All of which raises an intriguing possibility.

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Was the story of the Gorgon's head an attempt by the Greeks

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to explain what would otherwise have been inexplicable wonders?

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Colossal skeletons fashioned out of rock?

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Certainly, one thing is clear.

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Giant fossilised monsters, back in Classical times as now,

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made for phenomenal box office.

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In 58 BC, when a flamboyant showman

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by the name of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus

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returned home after a spell throwing his weight around in Judea,

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he brought with him a giant fossil, which he claimed to have been

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the very monster turned to stone by Perseus.

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The monster, we are told, was over 40 feet long,

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the height of its ribs was greater than that of an Indian elephant,

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and its spine was one and a half feet thick.

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Now, we have no idea what it was that Scaurus had actually brought back with him -

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the fossil of some prehistoric beast, clearly, a giant whale perhaps,

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or even it may be some composite monster,

0:22:080:22:12

fashioned out of a whole assortment of fossilised remains.

0:22:120:22:16

But of one thing we can be absolutely confident.

0:22:180:22:22

It wasn't a dinosaur.

0:22:220:22:24

All the giant bones found across the Mediterranean came from mammals.

0:22:240:22:28

Elephants, rhinoceroses, Samotheriums.

0:22:280:22:32

We know this because the rocks that contain them

0:22:320:22:35

are of relatively recent origin - say eight million years old.

0:22:350:22:40

To contain the bones of dinosaurs, they would have had to be

0:22:400:22:43

more than eight times that age.

0:22:430:22:46

But what about dinosaur remains outside the Mediterranean?

0:22:490:22:53

Did the Greeks know anything about them?

0:22:530:22:56

Adrienne Mayor thinks they did. And for someone like me,

0:22:560:23:00

whose childhood craze for dinosaurs

0:23:000:23:02

evolved seamlessly into an obsession with the ancient Greeks,

0:23:020:23:06

it's a completely gripping theory.

0:23:060:23:08

The Greeks might have had knowledge of dinosaur remains

0:23:080:23:14

if they travelled further east, along the silk routes

0:23:140:23:17

where there are dinosaur remains,

0:23:170:23:19

much further east than the Mediterranean world.

0:23:190:23:21

Beyond the land of the Scythians,

0:23:210:23:23

a people who inhabited a vast stretch of central Asia,

0:23:230:23:27

there rose a steepling chain of mountains.

0:23:270:23:31

So reports Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century BC.

0:23:310:23:36

And beyond these mountains there exist mysterious creatures

0:23:360:23:41

called griffins.

0:23:410:23:43

Herodotus reported stories that he heard from the Scythian nomads.

0:23:430:23:48

They told him about griffins. Strange creatures with beaks,

0:23:480:23:53

four legs, nests on the ground for their eggs,

0:23:530:23:56

that guarded the gold deposits that the Scythians mined and prospected.

0:23:560:24:01

These creatures were fearsome.

0:24:010:24:06

They preyed on horses and miners.

0:24:060:24:10

Looking at the way Greeks represented griffins,

0:24:110:24:14

as in this fine collection on Samos,

0:24:140:24:16

you might think that these were fantastical creatures,

0:24:160:24:20

the product of over-heated imaginations.

0:24:200:24:22

But that was not the understanding of the Greeks themselves.

0:24:230:24:27

The early travellers may have been shown fossils of dinosaurs

0:24:270:24:31

to support those stories of a beaked creature with four legs,

0:24:310:24:35

burrows - nests on the ground near the gold,

0:24:350:24:40

guarding the gold, actually.

0:24:400:24:42

Now, in the Gobi desert, east of the Altai Mountains,

0:24:420:24:47

there stretches one of the richest hunting grounds

0:24:470:24:50

for dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world.

0:24:500:24:53

In 1922, when an American adventurer,

0:24:540:24:58

a kind of proto-Indiana Jones named Roy Chapman Andrews,

0:24:580:25:01

made the first paleontological survey of the region,

0:25:010:25:05

he and his men were astounded by what they found.

0:25:050:25:08

Fossils, he reported,

0:25:080:25:10

were strewn over the surface almost as thickly as stones.

0:25:100:25:15

The desert was positively paved with bones.

0:25:150:25:19

Most astounding of all, there were nests - nests filled with eggs.

0:25:190:25:25

The very first dinosaur eggs ever found.

0:25:250:25:28

This film shows the creature who laid them.

0:25:320:25:35

It was a distant ancestor of one of the most celebrated dinosaurs ever found in the Wild West,

0:25:370:25:42

the three-horned living tank Triceratops,

0:25:420:25:46

and so, perhaps not surprisingly, it was named Protoceratops.

0:25:460:25:51

And if it seems to resemble descriptions given by Greek writers of the griffin,

0:25:510:25:55

well, perhaps it's not entirely coincidence.

0:25:550:25:58

And there's further evidence for the link

0:25:580:26:01

between dinosaur bones and griffins.

0:26:010:26:04

We're told by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the court

0:26:040:26:07

of the Persian king in the fifth century BC,

0:26:070:26:10

"griffins are a race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves,

0:26:100:26:16

"and with legs and claws like lions."

0:26:160:26:18

The Scythians described griffins as combining the features of birds and mammals.

0:26:180:26:24

They were attempting to describe accurately

0:26:240:26:28

the fossils that they saw, the fossils of dinosaurs,

0:26:280:26:31

things that they had never seen alive.

0:26:310:26:33

And the fossils of the dinosaurs, Protoceratops dinosaurs,

0:26:330:26:36

combine the features of mammalian, four-legged creature, a predator,

0:26:360:26:41

with the beak of a raptor, or an eagle, or a bird of some sort.

0:26:410:26:46

If Mayor's Protoceratops as bird-like monster theory is accurate,

0:26:460:26:51

and it's received wide support both from classicists and from palaeontologists,

0:26:510:26:55

then it suggests something really rather remarkable.

0:26:550:26:59

The mural in the Peabody is called The Age of Reptiles.

0:27:020:27:06

It shows us dinosaurs as terrible lizards.

0:27:060:27:08

But the ancient nomads of Mongolia, it seems,

0:27:080:27:12

recognised in Protoceratops not a reptile, but a kind of bird,

0:27:120:27:16

which prefigures what is pretty much the consensus of scientists today.

0:27:160:27:22

The notion that birds are so closely related

0:27:220:27:24

to dinosaurs, that they are in fact a kind of dinosaur themselves,

0:27:240:27:28

has been fundamentally shaped by recent discoveries in Asia.

0:27:280:27:33

So how haunting it is to see

0:27:330:27:35

in the fabulously ancient figure of the griffin,

0:27:350:27:39

a possible foreshadowing of insights

0:27:390:27:42

that embody the absolute paleontological cutting edge.

0:27:420:27:46

And just maybe, griffins weren't the only mythical creatures

0:27:480:27:52

to have been inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones.

0:27:520:27:55

In China, the figure of the dragon was for millennia

0:27:560:28:01

an emblem of the Emperor, and it remains to this day

0:28:010:28:05

a potent symbol of Chinese identity and culture.

0:28:050:28:08

The earliest representations of dragons

0:28:100:28:13

reach as far back as 6,000 BC.

0:28:130:28:16

Could it be that the fossils of dinosaurs also gave rise to this fabulously enduring creature?

0:28:170:28:24

Were dragons ancient China's attempt to explain the mystery of outsized bones,

0:28:240:28:29

the bones of dinosaurs such as those that today

0:28:290:28:33

are known as Tsintaosaurus,

0:28:330:28:36

Yangchuanosaurus,

0:28:360:28:39

or Sinosauropteryx?

0:28:390:28:43

The evidence, as you might expect, is, to put it mildly,

0:28:430:28:46

circumstantial.

0:28:460:28:48

All the same, a fascinating demonstration of just how

0:28:480:28:52

potent the hold can be of fossils on the Chinese imagination

0:28:520:28:56

came to light only a few years ago.

0:28:560:28:58

In 2006, in central China, palaeontologists discovered that

0:29:000:29:05

the remains of dinosaurs were being dug up and sold as "dragon bones".

0:29:050:29:09

900 grams were going for the equivalent of 50p.

0:29:090:29:12

Villagers told the palaeontologists that they had been excavating

0:29:150:29:18

the seam of fossils for a couple of decades.

0:29:180:29:22

But the antiquity of Chinese medical practises suggests that

0:29:220:29:26

the attribution of dinosaur bones to dragons

0:29:260:29:29

may reach very much further back in time.

0:29:290:29:32

Certainly, what we do know is that in China, dragons have been

0:29:330:29:37

associated with health and good fortune for millennia.

0:29:370:29:42

Ancient recipes employing the fossilised bones of large,

0:29:430:29:47

prehistoric mammals, and probably dinosaurs too,

0:29:470:29:50

are included in the Chinese Materia Medica -

0:29:500:29:52

compendia of centuries-old traditional medicine.

0:29:520:29:57

The size of the bones that are recorded in the Materia Medica,

0:29:570:30:02

they are clearly large bones and not of ordinary mammals,

0:30:020:30:06

and they would have been given tremendous significance in the Materia Medica.

0:30:060:30:11

In a culture which believed in the reality of dragons,

0:30:110:30:15

these large bones were clearly at a premium.

0:30:150:30:18

This is one of the earliest recipes to mention dragon bones,

0:30:180:30:22

first recorded in the third century BC.

0:30:220:30:26

What you do is that you grind the bones to dust,

0:30:260:30:29

and mix them with various herbal medicines.

0:30:290:30:33

Then you eviscerate two swallows and you pack the bone,

0:30:350:30:39

which is now fine dust, into small bags and place them

0:30:390:30:44

inside the swallows and hang them overnight over a well.

0:30:440:30:48

Once you have done that, they are magically efficacious.

0:30:490:30:53

-So let's put our bag inside and let it boil.

-It's like a tea bag.

0:30:560:31:01

Like a tea bag. Exactly.

0:31:010:31:03

So we're expecting all the essence of these various herbs

0:31:030:31:06

to come out of the bag into the surroundings.

0:31:060:31:09

Chris Duffin, a historian of geology and folklore, made tea for me

0:31:090:31:13

following the ancient recipe, but omitting the eviscerated swallow.

0:31:130:31:17

He didn't recommend I drink it, though.

0:31:180:31:20

One of the herbal ingredients -

0:31:200:31:22

not the powdered bone - turns out to be highly toxic.

0:31:220:31:24

When Huang Di, the First Emperor,

0:31:290:31:31

died more than 4,000 years ago, his admirers declared

0:31:310:31:34

that he had risen into the heavens in the form of a dragon.

0:31:340:31:38

An intriguing thought,

0:31:400:31:42

that long before scientists gave Tyrannosaurus his surname of 'Rex',

0:31:420:31:45

the Latin word for 'King',

0:31:450:31:47

royalty and dinosaurs might have been paired up in ancient China.

0:31:470:31:51

Nor was it only in China that big bones were

0:31:550:31:58

believed by the ancients to bring good luck.

0:31:580:32:01

The Greeks too, when they weren't listening to travellers' tales about griffins,

0:32:010:32:05

might be busy harvesting fossils themselves.

0:32:050:32:08

In Greece, giant petrified bones were seen as talismans

0:32:080:32:12

that might bring power, prestige, even victory in battle.

0:32:120:32:17

The best example comes from a war that featured that Tyrannosaur

0:32:190:32:23

among the cities of ancient Greece, Sparta.

0:32:230:32:27

Now, most Greeks, relative to the Spartans, were herbivores.

0:32:270:32:31

Which isn't to say they were exactly wusses.

0:32:310:32:33

When they marched to battle, they would make a fearsome sight. They would have their shields,

0:32:330:32:38

the equivalent of the crest of this Triceratops,

0:32:380:32:41

and they would use them to make a phalanx, out of which would bristle their spears,

0:32:410:32:47

the equivalent of a Triceratops's horns.

0:32:470:32:50

When they met with another city's phalanx,

0:32:500:32:53

they would charge one another

0:32:530:32:57

and shove and gouge and hack

0:32:570:33:00

until one side turned and fled.

0:33:000:33:03

But the Spartans were different.

0:33:060:33:09

Unlike the warriors of other cities, they were full-time - professional.

0:33:090:33:14

The very earth would shake to the rhythm of their metronomic approach.

0:33:140:33:19

As they emerged through the dust of battle,

0:33:190:33:22

they would reveal a terrifying wall of scarlet and bronze.

0:33:220:33:26

When they charged,

0:33:260:33:27

it wouldn't necessarily be a full-frontal attack.

0:33:270:33:31

The Spartans, unlike other Greeks,

0:33:310:33:34

had the training to launch their wings in a flanking action.

0:33:340:33:38

Their aim - to attack the vulnerable sides of an enemy phalanx

0:33:380:33:42

and shred it to pieces.

0:33:420:33:45

Their style of battle, I suppose, was like that of a Tyrannosaur.

0:33:450:33:49

Not that the Spartans always won.

0:34:040:34:07

When, in the early sixth century BC, they sought to conquer

0:34:070:34:10

the neighbouring city of Tegea, they suffered a humiliating defeat.

0:34:100:34:15

But just like Tyrannosaurs, which often seem to have suffered

0:34:150:34:19

quite serious wounds and yet invariably come back for more,

0:34:190:34:22

the Spartans rarely took defeat lying down.

0:34:220:34:25

In the wake of this reverse,

0:34:270:34:29

they sent a delegation to Tegea under cover of a truce.

0:34:290:34:32

News had reached them of a strange find in a blacksmith's yard -

0:34:320:34:36

the spine of a giant skeleton.

0:34:360:34:39

No wonder the Spartans were excited. They had been told, you see,

0:34:390:34:42

by an oracle, that they would only ever conquer Tegea

0:34:420:34:45

if they could first capture a skeleton,

0:34:450:34:48

the bones of an ancient prince called Orestes.

0:34:480:34:52

Orestes had the kind of dysfunctional family background

0:34:520:34:56

that the ancient Greeks loved in their heroes.

0:34:560:34:59

His mum had killed his dad. He'd killed his mum. Outsize events.

0:34:590:35:04

And so who was to say that Orestes had not been outsize as well?

0:35:040:35:08

And if he had been on a physically sensational scale,

0:35:080:35:11

indeed, a giant,

0:35:110:35:12

then what else could the skeleton in the blacksmith's yard be,

0:35:120:35:15

if not the very bones of the great hero that the Spartans wanted?

0:35:150:35:21

All just a bit of a stretch, you might have thought,

0:35:210:35:24

except that sure enough, it turned out

0:35:240:35:27

that the Spartans' hunch had been spot on.

0:35:270:35:30

The bones were dug up, smuggled to Sparta, shown off, then re-interred.

0:35:300:35:36

Shortly afterwards,

0:35:360:35:38

the Tegeans submitted to their mastery of their hated neighbours.

0:35:380:35:42

A resounding triumph for the Spartan military-paleontological complex.

0:35:420:35:47

So what was the skeleton? Almost certainly not the bones of Orestes.

0:35:500:35:56

We can't be certain,

0:35:560:35:58

but the remains most likely belonged to a mastodon,

0:35:580:36:01

a large prehistoric kind of elephant, the remains of which

0:36:010:36:04

were still being dug up around Tegea as late as the 20th century.

0:36:040:36:09

All of which makes for a puzzle - why should the Spartans

0:36:090:36:13

have presumed that the bones belonged to an ancient hero?

0:36:130:36:17

The Greeks, when they contemplated the Earth's ancient past,

0:36:180:36:23

conceived of it as an age of giants.

0:36:230:36:26

Heroes in particular had been built on a colossal scale.

0:36:260:36:29

Now, it is true that, for all the restlessness of their curiosity

0:36:330:36:37

and the sheer sweep of their metaphysical speculations,

0:36:370:36:40

they had no real understanding of the vastness of time

0:36:400:36:44

that had preceded the appearance of humans on Earth.

0:36:440:36:48

What they did have, however,

0:36:480:36:49

was a sense that humanity had evolved and changed over time,

0:36:490:36:53

albeit not in a way that Darwin would have recognised.

0:36:530:36:56

To classical thinkers, it was a fundamental presumption that everything was going to the dogs.

0:36:560:37:02

What had once been a golden age was now an age of iron.

0:37:020:37:07

The human race, originally a breed of heroes,

0:37:070:37:10

had degenerated and diminished

0:37:100:37:13

and ended up literally dwarfish.

0:37:130:37:17

And what had served to give the Greeks this particular notion?

0:37:190:37:23

Of course, in a sense it's just human nature to presume

0:37:230:37:26

that things were better in the good old days.

0:37:260:37:28

But the Greeks weren't just drawing on a gut conservatism

0:37:280:37:32

for their understanding of the distant past.

0:37:320:37:34

They had evidence for it,

0:37:340:37:37

such as the outsize bones dug up at Tegea by the Spartans.

0:37:370:37:41

The people of Samos may have identified the elephant bones on their island correctly

0:37:430:37:47

but most Greeks, confronted by a giant fossil, would like as not

0:37:470:37:51

believe it to be the remains of some legendary giant hero.

0:37:510:37:55

Indeed, so wide-spread was this presumption that the relics

0:37:570:38:02

of renowned big-hitters such as Theseus or Ajax

0:38:020:38:04

became must-have accessories for any temple keen to make its mark.

0:38:040:38:09

Here is one of those venerated giant bones, now recognised

0:38:110:38:16

to be part of the femur of an Ice Age Woolly rhinoceros.

0:38:160:38:19

It was dug up in a temple at Nichoria near Sparta.

0:38:190:38:24

This is one of only two

0:38:240:38:25

fossilised bones of this sort that are known

0:38:250:38:31

from Greek sanctuaries.

0:38:310:38:34

-So is a really rare and precious object.

-It is indeed.

0:38:340:38:38

It's a very rare discovery.

0:38:380:38:41

They would have seen it as a relic, almost certainly of a lost hero.

0:38:410:38:47

Very much like the way we see relics of saints,

0:38:470:38:52

displayed in reliquaries in churches today.

0:38:520:38:57

So it was that fossil bones ended up as tourist attractions

0:38:570:39:02

across first the Greek, and then the Roman world.

0:39:020:39:06

Even Caesars might come to gawp.

0:39:060:39:08

The emperor Hadrian, we are told,

0:39:090:39:12

when a skeleton with kneecaps the size of a discus was exposed

0:39:120:39:16

on a beach, "embraced and kissed the bones, and laid them out."

0:39:160:39:21

No wonder, then, confronted by such seemingly incontrovertible evidence

0:39:210:39:26

for the colossal stature of ancient men, that the Romans

0:39:260:39:29

should long have clung to their belief in a form of evolution -

0:39:290:39:35

"survival of the unfittest".

0:39:350:39:37

400 years on from the birth of Christ,

0:39:400:39:42

and scholars still clung to it.

0:39:420:39:45

"The older the world becomes, so the smaller will be the bodies of men."

0:39:450:39:51

The man who spoke these words was Augustine,

0:39:510:39:54

a brilliant intellectual living in what is now Tunisia,

0:39:540:39:58

even as the Roman empire was busy imploding all around him.

0:39:580:40:02

Tumultuous though the times were, Augustine didn't let them

0:40:020:40:06

distract him from his excitement at the discovery of an elephant tooth.

0:40:060:40:10

Not, however, that Augustine thought that it was an elephant tooth.

0:40:100:40:14

In size, as he pointed out, "it was as big as 100 human teeth combined."

0:40:140:40:19

No wonder, then, that he should have stated confidently,

0:40:190:40:23

"I believe it belonged to some giant."

0:40:230:40:26

Living as he did in the fourth century AD, Augustine's take on

0:40:270:40:31

this mysterious relic, however, was complex.

0:40:310:40:35

He had one foot in the waning world of classical culture,

0:40:380:40:42

but he was also a Christian, a bishop, a saint.

0:40:420:40:46

He knew and loved his Virgil, but he lived to see Rome sacked.

0:40:460:40:51

In attempting to explain the mysterious giant's tooth,

0:40:510:40:54

he looked backwards to the traditions of the Greeks and the Romans,

0:40:540:40:58

but he looked forwards as well, to those of the Middle Ages.

0:40:580:41:03

As the gods and heroes of the classical world

0:41:030:41:06

faded before the triumph of the Church, so new explanations

0:41:060:41:10

for the existence of huge fossilised bones took their place.

0:41:100:41:15

This time, they were derived from the Bible.

0:41:150:41:18

Of course, the scholars of the Middle Ages,

0:41:180:41:21

like the philosophers and biologists of ancient Greece,

0:41:210:41:24

had no real idea just how ancient life on Earth really was.

0:41:240:41:28

But they weren't wholly lacking a notion of a vanished age

0:41:290:41:32

that had belonged to beings larger and more exotic than themselves.

0:41:320:41:37

These creatures, like the heroes of ancient Greece, were human.

0:41:370:41:42

Colossally human.

0:41:420:41:44

Giants.

0:41:440:41:46

But where had these giants gone?

0:41:490:41:51

The answer to that, so people in the Middle Ages believed,

0:41:510:41:55

was to be found in the greatest cataclysm ever to afflict humanity -

0:41:550:41:59

Noah's flood.

0:41:590:42:01

Now, the animals may have gone in two by two,

0:42:020:42:05

but not everyone got out of the rain.

0:42:050:42:07

"There were giants in the earth in those days."

0:42:070:42:11

So we're told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible,

0:42:110:42:14

about the world that preceded Noah's flood.

0:42:140:42:17

And sometimes, in the course of exploration or excavation,

0:42:170:42:20

people would find the bones of these same giants.

0:42:200:42:24

Augustine was one of the first, but certainly not the last,

0:42:250:42:28

to explain fossils in terms of the Flood.

0:42:280:42:31

In 1342, for instance, a cave was discovered in Southern Italy

0:42:310:42:36

that contained the skeleton of a man 400 feet tall -

0:42:360:42:40

or so we are told by the great medieval writer Boccachio.

0:42:400:42:43

"To display their discovery to posterity, the citizens

0:42:430:42:47

"of Trapani strung the bones on a wire and carried them to a church."

0:42:470:42:51

Not every wonder discovered in rock, however,

0:42:550:42:58

was to be explained as the relic of a vanished giant.

0:42:580:43:02

What, for instance,

0:43:020:43:03

were good Christians to make of mysterious footprints like these?

0:43:030:43:07

We now know that these bird-like tracks,

0:43:090:43:12

discovered in Oxfordshire,

0:43:120:43:13

were left by the ancestors of carnivorous dinosaurs

0:43:130:43:16

like Tyrannosaurus.

0:43:160:43:18

But it's no wonder that back in the Middle Ages, when similar prints

0:43:180:43:21

were discovered in locations ranging from Poland to the Alps,

0:43:210:43:25

that some rather diabolical explanations

0:43:250:43:28

should have been provided.

0:43:280:43:32

"Whence comest thou?" God asks Satan in the Bible.

0:43:320:43:36

Back comes the answer,

0:43:360:43:38

"From going to and fro in the Earth, and from walking up and down in it."

0:43:380:43:44

Indeed, so closely associated with the Devil were the footprints

0:43:440:43:48

of prehistoric creatures that it was not unknown for attempts

0:43:480:43:52

to be made to neutralise their malign power by incorporating them

0:43:520:43:56

into the fabric of a church, as here at Bebington in Cheshire.

0:43:560:44:00

But Satanic walkabouts weren't the only explanation for dinosaur tracks

0:44:000:44:04

that seem to have grown up in the Middle Ages.

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As in the East, so in the West, people told tales of dragons.

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Those of Europe, however, unlike those of China, were malign,

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worthy trophies for a passing hero.

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Indeed, dinosaur footprints have been found

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beside the Rhine in the very spot traditionally associated

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with Fafnir, the gold-guarding dragon slain by Siegfried,

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and immortalised in the opera by Richard Wagner.

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Nice to think that a dinosaur's plod through a Jurassic swamp

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might have contributed to the Ring Cycle.

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In fact, so vividly did dragons haunt

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the imaginations of Germans in the Middle Ages that in 1335,

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when this huge skull was dug up

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outside the Austrian town of Klagenfurt,

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the locals had no doubt what it was.

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The story goes that once, back in the earliest days of the town,

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a nearby swamp was the haunt of a monstrous serpent...

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until a bold knight, as bold knights tended to do

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back in those days, decided to take the dragon on.

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So what the knight did was he got hold of a cow,

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he stuffed it full of quicklime and then he used the cow as bait.

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The dragon came roaring down,

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devoured the cow, the quicklime ignited, the dragon exploded,

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and bang, Klagenfurt had been made safe for civilisation.

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Two and a half centuries on from the discovery of the mysterious skull,

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and the legend had only improved in the telling.

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So much so, that in 1590, the good folk of Klagenfurt were inspired to commission...

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this.

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Once again, a fossilised bone inspired a fabulous creation,

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this time in three dimensions. Which I suppose begs an obvious question.

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To what creature had the skull dug up in 1335 actually belonged?

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The answer - not a dragon, but a woolly rhinoceros.

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And this forlorn spot north of the town was where it breathed its last.

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There's a sense, then, in which the sculpture,

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fashioned within the lifetimes of Galileo and Francis Bacon,

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might seem a last spasm of medieval superstition.

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But that, I think, would be unfair.

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Yes, it looks back to a time when people believed that dragons

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and giants had actually existed.

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But it looks ahead as well,

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to something that we can almost recognise as modern palaeontology.

0:46:400:46:45

This, after all, is not a monster conjured up

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purely from the imagination - it constitutes, however inadequately,

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the oldest surviving reconstruction of a prehistoric beast.

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A century on, and to scholars touched by the dawning rays

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of the Enlightenment,

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talk of dragons or giants was becoming an embarrassment.

0:47:120:47:15

In 1683, when the world's original university museum, the Ashmolean,

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first opened its doors in this Oxford building, a mysterious bone

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dug up near the village of Cornwell was one of its prize exhibits.

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In his book, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, Robert Plot,

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the first keeper of the Ashmolean,

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tried to work out what the bone had come from.

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First he speculates that it was the bone of an elephant

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brought to Britain by the Romans.

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And how he actually eliminates this as an option

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is in 1676, the year before his book is published, an elephant is

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actually exhibited in Oxford as part of a travelling menagerie.

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And you can imagine Plot going up to the elephant itself

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and pulling out his tape measure and measuring it,

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and actually comparing it to the bone he had in hand.

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He determines they're different in shape and size and eliminates that.

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He very quickly also eliminates horse and ox as viable candidates

0:48:120:48:16

and he concludes in the end, basically with the only, the only

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other conclusion that he could draw, was that it was the bone of a giant.

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This is the illustration in Plot's book of the mysterious relic.

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The original has vanished.

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In 1763, when a scholar named Richard Brookes inspected it,

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he gave it, in the most up to date scientific style,

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an imposing classical name, he called it - what else? -

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"Scrotum Humanum".

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Now, reflected in this name was the fact that Brookes,

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although he knew he wasn't really dealing with a pair of unfeasibly large testicles,

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still had no idea what kind of creature his "Scrotum Humanum"

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had actually been.

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Like the Ancient Greeks,

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like the Christians of the Middle Ages, Brookes and his contemporaries

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had not the faintest notion of just how ancient the planet truly was.

0:49:040:49:10

But all that was about to change,

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and fossilised bones, no longer embarrassments,

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would be enshrined as prize exhibits in a scientific revolution.

0:49:160:49:21

In 1788, a Scottish geologist named James Hutton published an almost

0:49:230:49:28

literally epochal book in which he proposed that the Earth

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was infinitely more ancient than humanity.

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Indeed, Hutton could find no evidence for there having been a creation at all.

0:49:340:49:39

"The result," he declared, "of our present enquiry is

0:49:390:49:44

"that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

0:49:440:49:48

The implications of this theory for the study of ancient beasts

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were not long in being in felt.

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Between 1815 and the early 1820s,

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a whole series of fossils were uncovered by men quarrying for slate

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down mine-shafts like this, at Stonesfield, north of Oxford.

0:50:130:50:19

So this narrow, cramped passageway is where slate was mined

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for the roofs of Oxford colleges and Cotswold cottages

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and it's where in the course of that mining the teeth,

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the bones of a mysterious and monstrous beast were found,

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and the significance of these finds

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is precisely that they were made down here underground,

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because it meant that the origins of these bones

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could be very precisely identified to a particular layer

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in the sequence of rocks.

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Whatever the creature was that these fossils had come from,

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one thing was absolutely clear.

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It was old, it was very, very old.

0:51:110:51:15

The bones belonged to the same mysterious creature

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that Richard Brookes had named "Scrotum Humanum".

0:51:190:51:23

But now there was to be no talk of giant's testicles.

0:51:230:51:26

This was because the fragments ended up in the hands of the man

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perhaps best qualified in the whole of Britain to identify them.

0:51:310:51:35

A clergyman named William Buckland,

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who also just happened to be Oxford's Professor of Geology.

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What Buckland deduced was that the fossilised bones had belonged

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to a very carnivorous and very large lizard.

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A Megalosaurus.

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By 1822, the name had appeared for the first time in print.

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The animal identified by Buckland

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"must in some instances have attained a length of 40 feet,

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"and stood eight feet high."

0:52:050:52:07

The notion that such a monster might once have wandered

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over Oxfordshire was, of course, a thrilling one.

0:52:100:52:14

With the remains of other similar giant lizards simultaneously

0:52:180:52:22

being found elsewhere across southern England,

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it opened up to the eyes of the public a quite staggering prospect.

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Once, it seemed, in the chillingly unfathomable reaches

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of a pre-human past, there had existed an entire world

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of savage reptiles, "red in tooth and claw".

0:52:380:52:42

"Time, cruel time. Come and subdue that brow."

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Quite how the existence millions upon millions of years ago

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of ravening Megalosaurs was to be squared with a Biblical chronology

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that had man being fashioned by a loving God on the sixth day of Creation,

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was for theologians, a most unexpected and alarming poser.

0:53:040:53:10

Buckland was merely the first of many clergymen

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to wrestle with the implications.

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Certainly, the discovery of so many fossils opened a vista

0:53:160:53:20

of monsters to the wide eyes of the Victorian public

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that compared with anything in the Bible

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or Greek mythology.

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"Dragons of the prime", as the great poet Tennyson put it,

0:53:300:53:33

"that tare each other in the slime."

0:53:330:53:37

Except, of course, that "dragons" was precisely what they were not.

0:53:370:53:43

The scientist who came up with a name for them was this man,

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Richard Owen.

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When he wasn't busy founding the Natural History Museum in London

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and being quite sensationally rude to all his colleagues,

0:53:520:53:55

Owen had a day job as Britain's leading anatomist.

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Megalosaurus, and creatures like it, he announced,

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had ranked not merely as lizards, but as "terrible lizards".

0:54:030:54:07

In Greek, dinosaurs.

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The name reflected the two sides of Owen's complex personality -

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the brilliant anatomist who had correctly extrapolated from a few scattered bones

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an entire kingdom of vanished creatures, and the devout Anglican,

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awestruck before the revelation of just how stupefying

0:54:260:54:30

God's creations had always been.

0:54:300:54:33

Nor was Owen alone in his wonder.

0:54:340:54:36

Within a decade of his first use of the word,

0:54:370:54:40

dinosaurs had become a veritable craze.

0:54:400:54:42

In 1854, Owen himself and an associate,

0:54:440:54:47

the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, blazed what would prove

0:54:470:54:51

a popular trail. They opened a dinosaur theme park.

0:54:510:54:55

And here it still stands - Crystal Palace in south London.

0:54:550:55:00

When Hawkins explained his motives for sculpting this Mesozoic wonderland,

0:55:140:55:18

he did so in words that not only foreshadow Jurassic Park,

0:55:180:55:23

but also echo the myth-making of our ancestors.

0:55:230:55:25

His aim, he declared, was "the reviving of the ancient world,

0:55:250:55:31

"to call up from the abyss of time and from the depths of the Earth,

0:55:310:55:35

"those vast forms and gigantic beasts which the Almighty Creator

0:55:350:55:40

"designed to inhabit and precede us in possession of this part of the Earth called Great Britain."

0:55:400:55:45

No wonder, then, that he and Owen

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wanted to include this particular beauty.

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So what we have here is none other than Megalosaurus itself.

0:55:540:55:59

Except that, as palaeontologists have long appreciated,

0:55:590:56:03

it actually looked nothing like this.

0:56:030:56:06

Megalosaurus was not built like a people-carrier.

0:56:060:56:10

In point of fact, it was a theropod, a two-legged proto-Tyrannosaur.

0:56:100:56:15

Which means that it looked like... this.

0:56:150:56:19

And that's why, when I was a child, I made a point of refusing

0:56:190:56:23

every offer from my parents to take me to Crystal Palace.

0:56:230:56:27

These reconstructions offended every last bone in my dino-geek body.

0:56:270:56:33

But now that I'm here, I can realise what a little prig I was being.

0:56:390:56:44

This model built of concrete may not be cutting-edge palaeontology,

0:56:450:56:50

but it tells you everything about why dinosaurs still fascinate us.

0:56:500:56:54

About the sense of awe and smallness we feel

0:56:550:56:58

when we contemplate the immensity of geological time,

0:56:580:57:01

and about how extraordinary it is, considering the millions

0:57:010:57:05

upon millions of years that separate us from the Mesozoic,

0:57:050:57:08

that we know anything about dinosaurs at all.

0:57:080:57:11

The achievements of palaeontology, ever since the heroic

0:57:110:57:14

pioneering days of Buckland and Owen,

0:57:140:57:16

have certainly been astounding.

0:57:160:57:19

And recent finds, especially in China,

0:57:190:57:21

have opened up new worlds of wonder and fascination.

0:57:210:57:26

But there is perhaps a sense, after all, in which

0:57:260:57:30

we are not so wholly far removed from those who saw in fossils

0:57:300:57:35

the remains of Thunder Birds, or griffins, or giants, or dragons.

0:57:350:57:41

Our understanding of dinosaurs today is defined for us

0:57:410:57:45

by the discoveries of scientists.

0:57:450:57:48

And yet, the nature of the fossil record being what it is,

0:57:490:57:54

those same scientists will never be able to fill in all the gaps.

0:57:540:57:58

And so it is, into those same gaps, that we,

0:57:580:58:02

just as our ancestors did, project all our manifold obsessions,

0:58:020:58:07

as variable and contradictory as human society itself.

0:58:070:58:10

It turns out that the science fiction stories were right all along.

0:58:110:58:16

Just when you think you've got dinosaurs pinned down,

0:58:160:58:19

they always break free.

0:58:190:58:21

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:58:450:58:48

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