First Fossil Hunters

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A01=Adrienne Mayor
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ancient discoveries
ancient world
archaeological evidence
Aristotle
Augustus
Author_Adrienne Mayor
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Centaurs
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dinosaurs
earthquake
Egypt
elephant
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fossil discovery
fossils
giants
Greek myth
Greeks and Romans
Griffin
history of paleontology
history of science
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mammoths
Mediterranean geology
Mediterranean paleontology
Megalopolis
Miocene
Olympia
Orestes
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paleontological hoaxes
paleontology
Pausanias
Peloponnese
petrified remains
Pleistocene
Pliny the Elder
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Roman empire
Rome
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Sparta
Sphinx
Trojan War
vertebrate fossils
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Product details

  • ISBN 9780691245607
  • Dimensions: 133 x 203mm
  • Publication Date: 11 Apr 2023
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythology

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.

Adrienne Mayor’s books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Fossil Legends of the First Americans (both Princeton). She is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford University.