The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. [Hardcover]

Adrienne Mayor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2000

Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants--these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.

As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground.

Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology. As Peter Dodson writes in his Foreword, "Paleontologists, classicists, and historians as well as natural history buffs will read this book with the greatest of delight--surprises abound."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Since fossils have presumably existed for millions of years, why don't we see much paleontological thought from ancient writers? Classics scholar Adrienne Mayor suggests that we can, in fact, learn much about the Greek and Roman attitudes toward fossils if we turn to a surprising source of data and theory: their myths. In The First Fossil Hunters, she explores likely connections between the rich fossil beds around the Mediterranean and tales of griffins and giants originating in the classical world. Striking similarities exist between the Protoceratops skeletons of the Gobi Desert and the legends of the gold-hoarding griffin told by nomadic people of the region, and the fossilized remains of giant Miocene mammals could be taken for the heroes and monsters of earlier times. Mayor makes her case well, but, as with all interpretive science, the arguments are inconclusive. Still, her novel reading of ancient myth--and her critique of the modern scientific mythology that seeks to explain the lack of classical paleontological thinking--is compelling and thought-provoking.

The final chapter of The First Fossil Hunters is an engrossing and occasionally quite funny look at "Paleontological Fictions" dating back several thousand years; the false tritons and centaurs give P.T. Barnum and his successors a much longer genealogy than previously thought. Whether or not you accept Mayor's analysis of Greek and Roman thinking, The First Fossil Hunters should open your eyes to new possibilities about our distant past. --Rob Lightner

From Scientific American

The history of paleontology, as it is usually seen, starts with the work of French naturalist Georges Cuvier some 200 years ago. Mayor, a classical folklorist, moves the date back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. "The ancients collected, measured, displayed, and pondered the bones of extinct beasts," she writes, "and they recorded their discoveries and imaginative interpretations of the fossil remains in numerous writings that survive today." Among the beasts whose bones they pondered were giant giraffes, mammoths and mastodons. Mayor also proposes that the griffin of classical folklore, described in the legends as having the body of a lion and the beak of an eagle, "was based on illiterate nomads' observations of dinosaur skeletons in the deserts of Central Asia." And she tells of purely imaginary creatures of the classical period, such as the triton and the centaur. But her focus is on what the ancients made of the bones of real animals. Advances in classical studies and paleontology, she says, "now make it possible to restore the ancient fossil investigations to their rightful place in the history of science."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691058636
• ISBN-13: 978-0691058634
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Paleontology > Paleozoology

More About the Author

Adrienne Mayor writes about the history of ancient science and warfare. In college during the Vietnam War, she received special permission to take ROTC courses in the history of war; 20 years later she began writing articles for MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. She is also a classical folklorist who investigates natural knowledge embedded in classcial Greek and Roman literature and other "pre-scientific" myths and oral traditions, looking for "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods.

Mayor's two books on pre-Darwinian fossil traditions in classical antiquity and in Native America ("The First Fossil Hunters" and "Fossil Legends of the First Americans") opened new windows in the emerging field of Geomythology.

"The First Fossil Hunters" is featured in the popular History Channel show "Ancient Monster Hunters," about Mayor's discovery of the links between ancient observations of dinosaur fossils and the gold-guarding Griffin of mythology. Her research on the connections between fossils and fabulous creatures helped inspire the traveling exhibit "Mythic Creatures" (launched at the American Museum of Natural History, 2007-17).

She also appears in the Thunderbirds and Mermaids videos on the History Channel's MonsterQuest website.

Her book "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs," on the origins and early use of biological weapons, uncovered the ancient roots of biochemical warfare. This book was featured in National Geographic, New York Times, and the History Channel's "Ancient Greek WMDs" --and it has become a favorite resource for diabolical, unconventional weaponry among ancient war-gamers.

Mayor is currently a research scholar in Classics and the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program at Stanford. Her work has been featured on NPR and BBC, Discovery and History TV channels, and other popular media, most recently the New York Times and National Geographic. Mayor's books are translated into Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Italian, and Greek.

Best-selling novelists frequently draw on Mayor's findings in their fiction, see for example, "Helen of Troy" and "Memoirs of Cleopatra" by Margaret George; "The Gryphon's Skull" by H. Turteltaub; "Dark Fire" by C.J. Sansom; and Brad Thor's thriller "Blowback."

Mayor spent 6 years researching and writing her latest book, "The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithridates," the first full biography in half a century of one of Rome's Deadliest Enemies and the world's first experimental toxicologist. "The Poison King" was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award, nonfiction and won top honors in Biography in the Independent Book Publishers Awards, 2010. "The Poison King" is available in German, Turkish, Greek, and Italian.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and novel, June 6, 2000

By 

M. Broderick "mikebinok" (Oklahoma City, OK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. (Hardcover)

Upfront I must confess that though I am very knowledgeable about history and science, I am neither a paleontologist nor an expert on Classical History. But I was intrigued by this book, and I found it fascinating.

The author begins the book with a slam-banger of an idea--The first chapter discusses the idea that the Greek legend of Griffons originated from Greek fossil observations in Asia. The author has very convincing evidence for this, based on how Griffons were described and handled differently by ancient writers, specific details of ancient writing, and fossil evidence still in place in modern times. I found it fascinating.

The later chapters are still interesting, though don't have the novel impact of the first chapter. The ancient attitude towards fossils is discussed, including quarrels between city-states over possession of fossils which were thought to be the remains of heroes and demigods.

I found the book interesting and convincing, but I cannot help wondering if maybe there is evidence being ignored when it would discredit the author's hypothesis. I lack enough expertise in either field to be sure. I fell for Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods as a teen-ager, and the experience keeps me suspicious of revolutionary ideas in archeology and ancient history, even to this day!

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars excellent ideas, but repetitive, June 20, 2000

By 

greglor "greglor" (Baltimore, MD United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. (Hardcover)

This book presents the idea that ancients were well aware of fossils, and discusses their interpretations of them. It shows how different members of society tried to interpret them in different ways (most interpreted them as being signs of giants and monsters, but some took this to show divine origins, and others took it to be part of natural history). The ideas are very interesting, and the history of the importance of different fossilized bones in different cities is quite exciting. My only complaint is that the books seems to be quite repetitive. Not only are the points that the author is trying to make repetitive, but she even repeats some of the stories she tells several times. A good editor could have trimmed out 1/3 of the book. All in all, a good book. Interesting, thorough, and decently referenced. For anyone interested in classics or paleontology, this is a good buy.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Those clever, curious Greeks, November 10, 2006

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. (Paperback)

Today, when a spectacular fossil is unearthed, it ends up in a museum. Our ancestors must have found stone bones, too, but they didn't have museums. So they put them in temples.

And spun yarns about them. It should not have been surprising that, once someone thought to ransack the ancient world for evidence, so much of it remains. We have already seen, in other fields, how much can be reconstructed from even the scraps of inscriptions that have been accumulated so assiduously by, for the most part, German philologists. And we already knew that the Greeks, above all other premodern people, asked questions about what they found in the world around them.

It is a bit of a surprise, if Adrienne Mayor is correct, that the model of the griffin should be dinosaur fossils found as far away as Central Asia. That was a very, very long way from Greece. Less surprising, perhaps, that fake fossils were also in evidence.

Probably none of the fossils collected so long ago remains, but Adrienne Mayor finds a few representations of them. The most convincing is a skull painted on a vase.

Her treatment is very complete, with an appendix of apparent references to fossils in old texts, such as a passing reference in Cicero to theft of fossils from a temple.

There is room for much speculation in this scrappy material, and Mayor makes the most of it.

Altogether, 'The First Fossil Hunters' is a clever, entertaining, imaginative and curious book.