It is reasoned that Scythian nomads saw the weathering skeletons of Protoceratops as they prospected for gold and told others of their existence. These stories are said to have originated with the Scythians, nomadic peoples who mined gold from central Asia from localities close to the bonebeds of Protoceratops in Mongolia and China. Tales of Ancient Greek explorers of the 7th century BCE (but first written about in the fifth century BCE) include discussion of vicious, beaked, gold-guarding quadrupedal animals living in deserts to the northeast of Greece. The basic premise of the Protoceratops-griffin hypothesis is straightforward. Was Protoceratops the inspiration for this creation? From Mayor and Heaney (1993). The idea has been praised by several palaeontologists and is celebrated as one of the superior accounts of fossils influencing ancient mythology.īird-griffin statue, 7th century BCE. These authors were not the first to suggest that the griffin had a basis in ancient interpretations of fossil animals (Mayor and Heaney 1993), but they presented the first argument linking griffins to horned dinosaurs as well as a suite of historic evidence supporting their interpretation. What I'll be calling the ' Protoceratops-griffin hypothesis' was first proposed by Adrienne Mayor and Michael Heaney in the 1993 Folklore paper "Griffins and Arimaspeans" and then developed by Mayor across two editions of the book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (2001, 2011). You could be forgiven for thinking that this idea is quite old and established because it's mentioned frequently in books, TV shows, and online articles, but it's actually a relatively modern invention. Specifically, it's said to be the origin for the griffin, the lion-bodied, bird-headed chimera that has appeared in art and folklore for thousands of years. One thing that everyone knows about the mid-sized, Late Cretaceous Asian horned dinosaur Protoceratops is that it's thought to be a fossil with historic, mythological significance. hellenikorhinus, a larger, more ornamented species of Protoceratops than the familiar P. Protoceratops, the Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur widely suggested as being the inspiration for the griffin myth.
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