Dragons and Dinosaurs: The Surprising Link Between Folklore and Fossils

Adrienne Mayor is a professor at Stanford University, and she has spent her career investigating the relationship between fossils and legends.[1] Her work has inspired multiple museum exhibits such as the traveling exhibit “Mythic Creatures,” and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum’s “Dragons Unearthed.”  Her work has also been featured in documentaries such as the A&E’s Quest for Dragons, the History Channel’s Ancient Monster Hunters, and the BBC’s Dinosaurs, Myths, and Monsters.

The story of how she began looking for fossils that inspired ancient stories is told in an accessible illustrated children’s book (5th-8th grade) called The Griffin and the Dinosaur: How Adrienne Mayor Discovered a Fascinating Link Between Myth and Science. The book tells how an observant, curious, and nature-loving child grew up to be a self-taught expert in geomythology, a field that didn’t really exist until Mayor started asking questions, making connections, and gathering evidence.

In the book The Griffin and the Dinosaur, we get to follow along as Mayor’s curiosity and fascination with ancient literature propels her on a quest around the world to confirm her hunch that the stories people tell about fantastic creatures can be linked to fossils that were discovered by people who lived in the region where the stories originated.

The book focuses on her pursuit of the fossil that inspired the Greek myths of griffins, creatures that were described as half lion, half bird. Mayor traces the literature back to the origin of the legends with Scythian gold miners. Sure enough, in the Gobi Desert where the Scythians dug for gold, Protoceratops fossils are plentiful and even include nests, eggs, and hatchlings that match the depictions of griffins in ancient art and legends.

After exploring the links between Greek mythology and fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, Mayor went on to research the connections between local fossils and Native American mythical creatures. She concluded that ancient cultures were very attuned to the natural world around them and made careful observations of the fossils in their environment. Based on their understanding of how the world works, they came up with imaginative explanations for the histories they saw in the bones and rocks they found. Their stories convincingly speak of the fossilized creatures as real because they knew only real creatures leave bones behind! But their vivid depictions do not prove humans actually coexisted with the prehistoric creatures.

The work of Adrienne Mayor is a great example of the detective work of science; how researchers turn questions about their observations into a testable hypothesis, how they use the hypothesis to make predictions about what they will find and then set out to gather more evidence to see if their hypothesis and predictions will be right. She is an inspiring role model for children who love exploring the world around them and relentlessly asking questions about what they notice. Her explanation of why we have so many great dragon legends to fuel our imaginations even today harmonizes a lot better with what we know from science than creationist claims about dinosaurs and humans coexisting.