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[Teaser] How They Did It: What Did Romans Think of Dinosaur Fossils?
🕑 Added 2022-06-08 20:40:07 +0000 UTCWe're so stoked about the release of this documentary. Here's a teaser of the script for our upcoming video, slated to be released this Friday.
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Enjoy the script!
Did people in the past find fossils?
The first thing to remember when we talk about fossils is that the time frame is absolutely beyond what we normally consider a "long time." The gap between us and the Ancient Romans is a large one - so large that we've made a whole bunch of videos highlighting their culture and the way they did things. That being said - dinosaur fossils are an order of magnitude older. Where the Romans lived 2,000 years before us, dinosaurs lived tens of millions of years before humanity itself. On that timescale, fossils that we find today would look… pretty much the same as they did to a centurion who stumbled on some petrified bones. The major difference was that paleontology as a concept didn't exist.
All that being said - people in the ancient world certainly found massive skeletons. Lacking any sort of explanation for their existence, they fell back on myths and legends. The earliest record we have of this was from the ancient Egyptians, who regularly offered bones to Set, the god of the desert. One set of finds from his temples, which has been "borrowed" by the British Museum for the past hundred years, is a large collection of bones. These are from all sorts of different animals, from crocodiles and hippos to actual fossils of creatures that were long extinct.
Our best sources, though, begin in the Greco-Roman period. Herodotus, known as “The Father of History” is the first of these sources. Many of his tales are false or exaggerated - such as his claim that India was home to giant gold-mining ants. Some of the rumors, though, have the ring of truth. He comments about a footprint in Scythia, known by the locals, that’s imprinted on a rock - three times as large as any man. He mentions remains of shells and molluscoids on the hills in Egypt, which he infers to mean that the land must have once been underwater. Perhaps most importantly, he writes that "In Arabia, opposite Buto, I went to try to get information about flying snakes. On my arrival I saw skeletons and spines in incalculable numbers; they were piled in heaps, some were big and others smaller. . . . The place where the bones lie is a narrow mountain pass leading to a broad plain which joins the plain of Egypt."
It’s often pretty unclear exactly what kinds of bones these were. Because paleontology didn’t exist, we usually just have to go off of the - often dramatized - image that historians portray. What’s undeniable, though, is that these fossils captured the imaginations of people in the ancient world. Serpentine fossils seem to be some of the most remarked upon, with Philostratus writing that “Northern India is girt with dragons of enormous size; not only are the marshes full of them but the mountains as well and not a single ridge is without one. . . . The dragons of the foothills have crests of moderate height when young but they grow with them and extend to a great height when they reach full size. The bodies of plains dragons are sometimes found with elephants, a great reward for hunters. Their tusks resemble those of swine but are more twisted and sharp. They say that in the skulls of the mountain dragons are stored stones of flowery colors that flash out all kinds of hues. They tell us that a great many dragons' skulls are enshrined in the center of the great city of Paraka close by the mountain.” While his description might be exaggerated, it does feel like a third-hand account of someone who’s found a large deposit of dinosaur fossils, noting that they’re especially common in marshes and rocky areas. Not only that, but the description even included a comment on “gembone” - a phenomenon that commonly occurs with dinosaur bones. This unique gemstone is one of the few “organic” gemstones that exist - and only happens when a bone is petrified.
These finds need some explanation. The remains were not from a more modern creature - some descriptions even describe some of them as “like an elephant, but way bigger.” They needed a reason for these to exist - and, without knowing that the earth was billions of years old, they turned to their stories and legends. The skull of a giant lizard? Well, that could be a dragon. Or, maybe a sea monster. Didn’t Heracles kill one of those? Or perhaps those monstrous catlike bones with enormous fangs might be the Nemean Lion! The footprint that Herodotus mentioned was attributed to Heracles, when he was on his journey to the land of the Amazons, and was a local tourist attraction. These finds probably weren’t the cause of myths, but they were certainly used to support stories of a legendary hero who happened to visit this spot at some point in the past. They were so popular that some pottery art even survives, showing Heracles in his heroic combat against a sea monster that looks suspiciously like a dinosaur fossil.
Skeptics existed, of course. In Tingis, a small town in what is now northern Morocco, the locals revered their local legend about another of Heracles’ famous exploits. They claimed that the skeleton of one of his foes, a semi-divine wrestler, lay under a mound right on the borders of their town. When a Roman aristocrat, a general named Sertorius, arrived in the town, he rolled his eyes. Of course, the locals would claim that this mound - nearly a hill - was the burial site of such a famous individual. None of them, though, had bothered to dig it up to double-check. So Sertorius promptly ordered his men to do so. When they dug up the hill, though, they discovered a massive skeleton. Plutarch claims that the skeleton was 85 feet long, but he’s pretty prone to exaggeration. This same area, though, is still well known for being a massive bed of wooly mammoths. Another theory is that it might have been an extinct whale. Either way, Sertorius, appropriately impressed, promptly reburied the skeleton with full honors.
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