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00:00People have always thrilled to tales of monsters, but there's nothing in myth that can compare for
00:14sheer wonder with creatures from tyrannosaurs to woolly mammoths that once actually existed.
00:20Today we know that life on this planet evolved over many millions of years and we have some
00:26idea at least of how prehistoric creatures once actually looked, but such knowledge is comparatively recent.
00:33When people in the past came across the fossilised bones of large vanished animals, it begged any number of questions.
00:42What sort of creatures could they possibly have come from? How old were these skeletal remains?
00:48Above all, perhaps, what did they mean?
00:52Just like us, ancient peoples were fascinated by the giant bones they found in the ground.
00:59Like us, they obsessed about their origins.
01:04In this programme, I'm going to explore the ways in which our ancestors sought to make sense of the remains of dinosaurs and other giant prehistoric creatures,
01:13and how they tried to reconcile such finds with their own understanding of life on Earth.
01:20That these explanations were wrong doesn't mean that they deserve our contempt, just the opposite.
01:27Science begins in wonder and a yearning to fathom what may at first seem unfathomable.
01:32In that sense, at any rate, our ancestors did have something of the paleontologists about them.
01:38And in one fundamental respect, they were absolutely spot on.
01:43Monsters had indeed once trodden the Earth.
01:47I made this masterpiece when I was five, and looking at it now, I think, well, I was never going to cut it as a sculptor.
02:03But I do remember the intensity of yearning, a kind of love, really, that went into the making of it.
02:12How desperately I wanted to see a dinosaur.
02:18Going out from my garden, the most exotic thing I could hope to see was a cow.
02:25But if I shut my eyes, I could imagine there was a long-necked brachiosaur reaching higher than the trees.
02:33A horned and crested triceratops making the fields shake.
02:39And of course, if I was feeling particularly ghoulish, a blood-beslathered tyrannosaur.
02:49Why was the present day so dull?
02:52Why didn't I live in a world full of swamps and pterosaurs and perpetually exploding volcanoes?
03:03Why couldn't my life be Mesozoic?
03:07And in a way, all my prayers have been answered.
03:1035 years too late for my seven-year-old self.
03:13But visit a museum today, and the displays have never been more animatronic.
03:21Nor for 65 million years has flesh been put more convincingly on the bones of dinosaurs like this Tyrannosaurus rex.
03:30CGI, the dinosaur lover's best friend.
03:44Now, the truth is, of course, that no human being has ever seen a living dinosaur.
03:49This is the Peabody Museum in New Haven, on the east coast of the United States.
03:58It contains this fabulous mural, painted in the 1940s.
04:03Dinosaurs first appear here, around 230 million years ago.
04:07And they last another 160 million years, right the way up to there, where no more dinosaurs.
04:16Of course, there are no humans anywhere in this mural.
04:20Homo sapiens didn't appear on earth for another 65 million years.
04:25But always, and it's certainly not just me who has it, that yearning in the imagination.
04:33That desire to know what these extraordinary creatures had truly looked like.
04:40And perhaps that's why, in the kind of science fiction story to which I was addicted as a boy,
04:44our prehistoric ancestors were always being shown alongside dinosaurs.
04:49Total fantasy? Of course.
04:52But still, it made me wonder.
04:56When cavemen came across the bones of dinosaurs, what did they make of them?
05:01It's an abiding mystery. By definition, they wrote nothing down.
05:04But there were some prehistoric peoples, for all that, who survived into historic times.
05:09Take North America, for instance, where hunter-gatherer tribes that for generations had been roaming the Great Plains,
05:19had long observed fossilised bones weathering out of the rocks,
05:23and invented stories to explain them.
05:28Adrian Meyer is a historian of ancient fossil hunting,
05:31with a high regard for the scientific abilities of the native peoples who lived in America before Columbus.
05:36Peoples who, by and large, were pre-literate, prehistoric.
05:43Their theories and their speculations and their myths, oral traditions, preserved in oral traditions over generations,
05:51over thousands of years, they were based on observation over time.
05:55They knew anatomy, they compared, they tried to imagine the creatures while alive,
06:02how they behaved, what they looked like, what kind of habitat.
06:04They actually had a sense of deep time.
06:07They had a sense of different ages on the earth, past ages, before the appearance of present-day humans.
06:14Each age characterised by different fauna and flora, different landforms.
06:21These are all prototypes of modern science, although they were all in mythological language.
06:26Even in the 19th century, by which point bone hunting or paleontology had become an all-American obsession,
06:36these Stone Age myths were still being retold.
06:40And among those pricking up their ears were scientists such as Othniel Charles Marsh,
06:45the first director of the Peabody Museum.
06:49Marsh was one of the first great paleontologists and a genuine pioneer.
06:54He rode shotgun on the Great Plains, he hung out with Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull,
06:59and he was adopted as a blood brother by the Sioux.
07:04Wakasa Pahihuhu, they called him.
07:08He who digs up bones.
07:11Many of the dinosaurs in the Peabody were dug up in the 1870s,
07:16a time when the West really was very wild.
07:21Among the collection are the first specimens ever found of iconic species,
07:26like Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus, the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus.
07:31Marsh's expeditions took him to the Badlands.
07:39There, in his hunt for fossils, he was drawing on the very latest in scientific research.
07:45But some of his sources were altogether more prehistoric.
07:50The Sioux, and other Native American peoples too,
07:54told stories of mysterious beasts, supernatural creatures,
07:58whose bones might be found scattered across the ground.
08:03But what had prompted these legends?
08:06From the Sioux, Marsh learned the legend of Thunderhorses,
08:11creatures that galloped over storm clouds
08:14and made them echo with the crashing of their hooves.
08:17His fascination with such stories helped to win him the trust of Native Americans.
08:23In 1874, at a time of great tension,
08:26when the whites were encroaching on their lands,
08:30Marsh was able to employ a Sioux as his guide.
08:33He learned about some impressive bones found by the tribe.
08:38They said they were from strange creatures that had once lived in the land of the Sioux.
08:43Bones now turned to stone.
08:46Marsh was shown the bones of this magnificent beast,
08:49a colossal mammal some 12 feet long,
08:53which had lived around 35 million years ago,
08:56and was indeed, amazingly enough, a relative of the horse.
09:00This is the very specimen that was shown to Marsh,
09:04and in honour of the legends of the Thunder Horse told him by the Sioux,
09:08he named the creature a brontotherium, a thunder beast.
09:12Most intriguing of all, perhaps, were the tales told across the Great Plains,
09:21not of thunder horses, but of thunder birds.
09:25Stories passed down the generations and still retold today.
09:28Long, long ago, when the two-leggeds were new to walking on Mother Earth,
09:36the Thunderbirds were their friends and advisers.
09:40They were great beasts, with wingspans as long as two war canoes.
09:46They had sharp-pointed beaks, with sharp-pointed teeth,
09:53and they lived in the sky, on the edge of the clouds.
09:58Many of these legends tell how the Thunderbirds had,
10:02as their deadliest enemies, giant aquatic monsters.
10:05Now, at this same time, lived the water monsters.
10:13They were huge, shaped like a snake, with feet.
10:19They had a big horn on their head, and spikes on the tip of their tail.
10:26It's surely suggestive that the story is often derived from regions of America
10:31which once, back in the age of the dinosaurs, were indeed covered by seas.
10:37Nowadays, the Great Plains consist of weathered sediment,
10:41complete with the skeletons of long-necked, marine reptiles called plesiosaurs,
10:46and pterosaurs, flying reptiles of the kind that were always carrying off Raquel Welch.
10:52And what do we find in Marsh's collection?
10:55A plesiosaur, and a pterosaur, a pteranodon.
11:01What all this suggests is an intriguing possibility.
11:06Almost all of the tribes had stories about water monsters and sky creatures,
11:12thunderbirds.
11:14And, of course, these personify violent forces of nature.
11:19Thunder and lightning, very powerful forces of nature,
11:23and then flooding, which was supposedly caused by water monsters.
11:26And when they found very large bones, fossilized bones, of extinct creatures eroding and weathering out of river banks and lake shores,
11:38they naturally thought that they must have been water creatures.
11:42And then when they also found fossilized shells and fish and turtles, they understood that this land had once been underwater.
11:49Now, it's not only on the Great Plains of America that we find evidence for a fascination on the part of pre-literate societies with the bones of vanished creatures.
12:00Go back far enough in time, and you find it on the opposite side of the Atlantic as well, in Greece.
12:12First and greatest of the Greek poets was Homer.
12:16But the two poems he wrote down some 2,800 years ago, the Iliad and the Odyssey, almost certainly contained material far older than that.
12:27Perhaps then, even before the time of Homer himself, people were telling the story of one of the most celebrated monsters in all Greek mythology.
12:37The story? Well, it's a thriller.
12:41The hero Odysseus, in his wanderings across the wine-dark sea, finds himself trapped in a cave by a hideous monster.
12:48A monster that snacks on human flesh and has, in its forehead, just a single circular eye.
12:55It's a cyclops.
12:56What is the trapped Odysseus to do? Well, he gets the cyclops drunk.
13:07Then he and his men take a large spike, they aim it over the cyclops' single eye.
13:14In goes the spike, splat, goes the eye.
13:18Who could doubt the truth of such a story when there was evidence of the tale to be found in the earth?
13:29Now, of course, this isn't actually the skull of a one-eyed monster.
13:34It's the skull of an elephant.
13:36And this is the large nasal opening from which its trunk once extended.
13:40The Greeks didn't become familiar with real live elephants until the 4th century BC, long after the story of the Cyclops first emerged.
13:54But we know from the fossil record that prehistoric species of elephant lived on Mediterranean islands long before humans were around.
14:03When ancient Greeks came across the preserved fossil skulls of these creatures eroded from the rocks or perhaps dug up by a farmer,
14:13did they mistake the outsized skull for a giant's head and the large nasal cavity as a huge single eye socket?
14:24Is this what inspired Homer's tale of the island-dwelling giant cyclops?
14:30Now, no ancient source directly confirms the cyclops theory, but it seems eminently plausible nevertheless.
14:38Not only were there large bones to be found scattered across the entire sweep of the Mediterranean,
14:44but we know as well from other legends, from the writings of classical authors,
14:49that the Greeks did indeed take an interest in the fossil bones of giant beasts.
14:54On a few occasions, ancient writers wrote down what they thought of large bones.
15:01They are among the earliest surviving written records of palaeontological knowledge.
15:06Take this, from The Life of Apollonius, by Philostratus.
15:10I agree that giants once existed, because gigantic bodies are revealed all over Earth when mounds are broken open.
15:20This is the site of what, back in classical times, was one of the most celebrated buildings in the entire Greek world.
15:38The Temple of Hera on the Aegean island of Samos.
15:49But it wasn't just its scale and beauty that wowed the Greeks.
15:53It was famous as well for something else, a collection of giant bones.
15:57But where had they come from?
16:00Well, as everyone on Samos knew, their island had been the scene way back in ancient times of a quite spectacular battle.
16:08One that had been fought between an army of ferocious female warriors called Amazons and the god Dionysus.
16:16And what had Dionysus brought with him as backup?
16:19Nothing less than a war train of elephants.
16:22Panima, the ancients called the site of this battle.
16:35The blood-soaked field.
16:41And its location?
16:43Well, its location seems to have been here.
16:47The soil, which elsewhere on Samos is a dirty white,
16:50here you can see is the colour of dried blood.
16:56And on either side of it, hills that are absolutely stuffed with prehistoric elephant bones.
17:03So what that implies is that this site was witness to an absolutely key event in the history of paleontology.
17:12The ancients who came across the bones here and explained them as the remains of elephants
17:16were blazing a trail that would be followed by 18th century by 19th century paleontologists.
17:23For the very first time, the fossils of long-lost megafauna were being identified correctly.
17:30Nor was that the limit of ancient Greek paleontological achievement.
17:34Take the evidence on this Corinthian vase from the 6th century BC, now in a Boston museum.
17:42Here's a brave hero, Heracles, coming to the rescue of Hisione, a princess of Troy, who is being menaced by a monster.
17:51Most art historians and specialists based paintings had identified this monster as a very poorly drawn sea monster,
18:01peeking out of a cave.
18:03To me, it looked a lot like a fossil skull eroding out of a cliffside.
18:09You can see that it's disembodied, it has no body.
18:11So this monster looks the way it does not because the artist was rubbish at drawing monsters.
18:16You think that it might actually be the fossil of an actual beast?
18:21Well, you know, if you look at the other figures on the vase, the humans and the other animals,
18:27they're all very well drawn.
18:29And so, I think the artist was actually a good artist, and he's given us a very good rendering of what a fossil skull would look like as it weathers out of a cliff.
18:39I think the model might have been a samotherium, which is a giant giraffe species.
18:46They lived in the Miocene.
18:48They left a lot of fossils in the Aegean, on the islands, in mainland Greece.
18:52That would be a very common fossil.
18:54Paleontologists noticed the large, empty eye socket, the broken-away nasal area, which is a very realistic rendition of a skull that's been in the ground for a long time.
19:06The jagged teeth, the back of the skull, it really matches what a samotherium skull looked like.
19:14This appears to be the oldest surviving artistic representation of a fossil in Greek art.
19:21So what we have here is an object that has absolutely key significance in the history of paleontology.
19:26I think it's a really powerful evidence that fossils did influence the way Greeks thought about their myths.
19:33For it to have been drawn so realistically, the skull must have been in good condition.
19:39But how did the Greeks think it had been preserved like that in rock?
19:43One possible answer can be found in the story of a second princess rescued from a monster.
19:48This is a book that used to belong to my grandmother, and if I open it here, there is a fabulous picture by the Victorian artist Lord Layton.
20:01And yes, it's true, there's a half-naked woman tied to a rock.
20:06But when I first came across this book back in my grandmother's house, I was still of an age to be far more interested in the fact that here was what seemed to be a dinosaur.
20:16In fact, it's a sea monster that was sent to ravage Joppa in what is now Israel after the local queen had been foolish enough to insult Poseidon, the god of the sea.
20:27And the naked woman is Andromeda, the queen's daughter, who was being offered to the monster in an attempt to calm Poseidon down.
20:34But no need to panic, because here comes the hero Perseus, armed with a Gorgon's head, and anyone who looks at the head is immediately turned to stone.
20:46And this, as you can see from the painting, is precisely the mistake that the monster has made.
20:53Andromeda was saved, and the monster, well, the monster was turned to stone, just like a fossil.
21:01All of which raises an intriguing possibility.
21:06Was the whole story of the Gorgon's head an attempt by the Greeks to explain what would otherwise have been inexplicable wonders?
21:14Colossal skeletons fashioned out of rock.
21:18Certainly, one thing is clear.
21:22Giant fossilised monsters, back in classical times as now, made for phenomenal box office.
21:29In 58 BC, when a flamboyant showman by the name of Marcus Aemilius Scourus returned home after a spell throwing his weight around in Judea, he brought with him a giant fossil, which he claimed to have been the very monster turned to stone by Perseus.
21:46The monster, we are told, was over 40 feet long. The height of its ribs was greater than that of an Indian elephant, and its spine was one and a half feet thick.
21:57Now, we have no idea what it was that Scourus had actually brought back with him, the fossil of some prehistoric beast, clearly a giant whale perhaps, or even, it may be, some composite monster fashioned out of a whole assortment of fossilised remains.
22:15But of one thing we can be absolutely confident. It wasn't a dinosaur. All the giant bones found across the Mediterranean came from mammals. Elephants, rhinoceroses, samotheriums.
22:30We know this because the rocks that contain them are of relatively recent origin, say, 8 million years old. To contain the bones of dinosaurs, they would have had to be more than eight times that age.
22:45But what about dinosaur remains outside the Mediterranean? Did the Greeks know anything about them? Adrian Meyer thinks they did.
22:58And for someone like me, whose childhood craze for dinosaurs evolved seamlessly into an obsession with the ancient Greeks, it's a completely gripping theory.
23:08The Greeks might have had knowledge of dinosaur remains if they travelled further east along the Silk Roots, where there are dinosaur remains, much farther east than the Mediterranean world.
23:21Beyond the land of the Scythians, a people who inhabited a vast stretch of Central Asia, there rose a steepling chain of mountains.
23:30So reports Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century BC.
23:35And beyond these mountains, there exist mysterious creatures called griffins.
23:42Herodotus reported stories that he heard from the Scythian nomads.
23:47They told him about griffins, strange creatures with beaks, forelegs, nests on the ground for their eggs,
23:56that guarded the gold deposits that the Scythians mined and prospected.
24:01These creatures were fearsome.
24:04They preyed on horses and miners.
24:08Looking at the way Greeks represented griffins, as in this fine collection on Samos,
24:15you might think that these were fantastical creatures, the product of overheated imaginations.
24:21But that was not the understanding of the Greeks themselves.
24:26The early travellers may have been shown fossils of dinosaurs to support those stories of a beaked creature with forelegs and burrows, nests on the ground, near the gold, guarding the gold, actually.
24:40Now, in the Gobi Desert, east of the Altai Mountains, there stretches one of the richest hunting grounds for dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world.
24:53In 1922, when an American adventurer, a kind of proto-Indiana Jones, named Roy Chapman Andrews, made the first paleontological survey of the region,
25:04he and his men were astounded by what they found.
25:07Fossils, he reported, were strewn over the surface almost as thickly as stones.
25:14The desert was positively paved with bones.
25:18Most astounding of all, there were nests.
25:21Nests filled with eggs.
25:24The very first dinosaur eggs ever found.
25:28This film shows the creature who laid them.
25:37It was a distant ancestor of one of the most celebrated dinosaurs ever found in the Wild West, the three-horned living tank Triceratops.
25:45And so, perhaps not surprisingly, it was named Protoceratops.
25:50And if it seems to resemble descriptions given by Greek writers of the Griffin, well, perhaps it's not entirely coincidence.
25:58And there's further evidence for the link between dinosaur bones and griffins.
26:03We're told by Theseus, a Greek physician at the court of the Persian king in the 5th century BC,
26:09griffins are a race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.
26:18The Scythians described griffins as combining the features of birds and mammals.
26:24They were attempting to describe accurately the fossils that they saw, fossils of dinosaurs, things that they'd never seen alive.
26:32And the fossils of the dinosaurs, Protoceratops dinosaurs, combine the features of mammalian, four-legged creature, predator,
26:40with the beak of a raptor or an eagle, a bird of some sort.
26:45If Mayer's Protoceratops as bird-like monster theory is accurate,
26:50and it's received wide support both from classicists and from paleontologists,
26:54then it suggests something really rather remarkable.
26:57The mural in the Peabody is called the Age of Reptiles.
27:04It shows us dinosaurs as terrible lizards.
27:07But the ancient nomads of Mongolia, it seems, recognised in Protoceratops not a reptile but a kind of bird,
27:15which prefigures what is pretty much the consensus of scientists today.
27:21The notion that birds are so closely related to dinosaurs that they are in fact a kind of dinosaur themselves
27:27is one that's been fundamentally shaped by recent discoveries in Asia.
27:31So how haunting it is to see in the fabulously ancient figure of the griffin a possible foreshadowing of insights
27:41that embody the absolute paleontological cutting edge.
27:47And just maybe griffins weren't the only mythical creatures to have been inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones.
27:56In China, the figure of the dragon was for millennia an emblem of the emperor,
28:02and it remains to this day a potent symbol of Chinese identity and culture.
28:08The earliest representations of dragons reach as far back as 6000 BC.
28:17Could it be that the fossils of dinosaurs also gave rise to this fabulously enduring creature?
28:23Were dragons ancient China's attempt to explain the mystery of outsized bones?
28:29The bones of dinosaurs such as those that today are known as Qingdaosaurus, Yangtuanosaurus,
28:39or Cinosauropteryx.
28:42The evidence, as you might expect, is, to put it mildly, circumstantial.
28:47All the same, a fascinating demonstration of just how potent the hold can be of fossils on the Chinese imagination came to light only a few years ago.
28:59In 2006, in central China, paleontologists discovered that the remains of dinosaurs were being dug up and sold as dragon bones.
29:08900 grams were going for the equivalent of 50p.
29:14Villagers told the paleontologists that they had been excavating the seam of fossils for a couple of decades.
29:20But the antiquity of Chinese medical practices suggests that the attribution of dinosaur bones to dragons may reach very much further back in time.
29:33Certainly, what we do know is that in China, dragons have been associated with health and good fortune for millennia.
29:41Ancient recipes employing the fossilized bones of large prehistoric mammals, and probably dinosaurs too, are included in the Chinese Materia Medica,
29:53a compendia of centuries-old traditional medicine.
29:56The size of the bones that are recorded in the Materia Medica, they're clearly large bones and not of ordinary mammals.
30:06And they would have been given tremendous significance in the Materia Medica.
30:11In a culture which believed in the reality of dragons, these large bones were clearly at a premium.
30:18This is one of the earliest recipes to mention dragon bones, first recorded in the third century BC.
30:25What you do is that you grind the bones to dust and you mix them with various herbal medicines.
30:31Then you eviscerate two swallows and you pack the bone, which is now fine dust, into small bags and place them inside the swallows and hang them overnight over a well.
30:47Once you've done that, they are magically efficacious.
30:51So let's put our bag inside and let it boil.
30:58So it's like a tea bag?
31:00Like a tea bag, exactly. So we're expecting all the essence of these various herbs to come out of the bag into the surroundings.
31:07Chris Duffin, a historian of geology and folklore, made tea for me following the ancient recipe, but omitting the eviscerated swallow.
31:17He didn't recommend I drink it, though. One of the herbal ingredients, not the powdered bone, turns out to be highly toxic.
31:23When Huang Di, the first emperor, died more than 4,000 years ago, his admirers declared that he had risen into the heavens in the form of a dragon.
31:37An intriguing thought that long before scientists gave Tyrannosaurus his surname of Rex, the Latin word for king, royalty in dinosaurs might have been paired up in ancient China.
31:50Nor was it only in China that big bones were believed by the ancients to bring good luck.
32:00The Greeks too, when they weren't listening to travellers' tales about griffins, might be busy harvesting fossils themselves.
32:07In Greece, giant petrified bones were seen as talismans that might bring power, prestige, even victory in battle.
32:16The best example comes from a war that featured a tyrannosaur among the cities of ancient Greece, Sparta.
32:26Now, most Greeks, relative to the Spartans, were herbivores, which isn't to say they were exactly wusses.
32:31When they marched into battle, they would make for a fearsome sight.
32:36They'd have their shields, which were the equivalent of the crest of this Triceratops, and they would use them to make a phalanx, out of which would bristle their spears, the equivalent of a Triceratops' horns.
32:48When they met with another city's phalanx, they would charge one another, and shove, and gouge, and hack, until one side turned and fled.
33:04But the Spartans were different.
33:08Unlike the warriors of other cities, they were full-time, professional.
33:13The very earth would shake to the rhythm of their metronomic approach.
33:17As they emerged through the dust of battle, they would reveal a terrifying wall of scarlet and bronze.
33:25When they charged, it wouldn't necessarily be a full frontal attack.
33:30The Spartans, unlike other Greeks, had the training that enabled them to launch their wings in a flanking action.
33:36Their aim? To attack the vulnerable sides of an enemy phalanx and shred it to pieces.
33:44Their style of battle, I suppose, was like that of a Tyrannosaur.
33:49Not that the Spartans always won.
34:07When, in the early 6th century BC, they sought to conquer the neighbouring city of Tegea,
34:13they suffered a humiliating defeat.
34:14But just like Tyrannosaurs, which often seem to have suffered quite serious wounds,
34:20and yet invariably come back for more, the Spartans rarely took defeat lying down.
34:27In the wake of this reverse, they sent a delegation to Tegea under cover of a truce.
34:32News had reached them of a strange find in a blacksmith's yard, the spine of a giant skeleton.
34:38Now, no wonder the Spartans were excited.
34:40They'd been told, you see, by an oracle that they would only ever conquer Tegea if they could first capture a skeleton.
34:47The bones of an ancient prince called Orestes.
34:51Orestes had the kind of dysfunctional family background that the ancient Greeks loved in their heroes.
34:57His mum had killed his dad. He'd killed his mum. Outsize events.
35:02And so who was to say that Orestes had not been outsized as well?
35:07And if he had been on a physically sensational scale, indeed a giant,
35:12then what else could the skeleton in the blacksmith's yard be if not the very bones of the great hero that the Spartans wanted?
35:19Well, just a bit of a stretch, you might have thought.
35:24Except that, sure enough, it turned out that the Spartans' hunch had been spot on.
35:29The bones were dug up, smuggled to Sparta, shown off, then reinterred.
35:35Shortly afterwards, the Tegeans submitted to the mastery of their hated neighbours.
35:40A resounding triumph for Sparta's military palaeontological complex.
35:50So, what was the skeleton?
35:53Almost certainly not the bones of Orestes.
35:56We can't be certain, but the remains most likely belonged to a mastodon, a large prehistoric kind of elephant,
36:03the remains of which were still being dug up around Tegea as late as the 20th century.
36:07All of which makes for a puzzle.
36:11Why should the Spartans have presumed that the bones belonged to an ancient hero?
36:18The Greeks, when they contemplated the Earth's ancient past, conceived of it as an age of giants.
36:25The heroes in particular had been built on a colossal scale.
36:29Now, it is true that for all the restlessness of their curiosity, and the sheer sweep of their metaphysical speculations,
36:39they had no real understanding of the vastness of time that had preceded the appearance of humans on Earth.
36:45What they did have, however, was a sense that humanity had evolved and changed over time,
36:52albeit not in a way that Darwin would have recognised.
36:56To classical thinkers, it was a fundamental presumption that everything was going to the dogs.
37:00What had once been a golden age was now an age of iron.
37:06The human race, originally a breed of heroes, had degenerated and diminished and ended up literally dwarvish.
37:15And what had served to give the Greeks this particular notion.
37:22Of course, in a sense, it's just human nature to presume that things were better in the good old days.
37:28But the Greeks weren't just drawing on a gut conservatism for their understanding of the distant past.
37:33They had evidence for it, such as the outsized bones dug up at Tagea by the Spartans.
37:42The people of Samos may have identified the elephant bones on their island correctly,
37:47but most Greeks, confronted by a giant fossil, would like as not believe it to be the remains of some legendary giant hero.
37:54Indeed, so widespread was this presumption that the relics of renowned big hitters such as Theseus or Ajax became must-have accessories for any temple keen to make its mark.
38:11Here is one of those venerated giant bones, now recognised to be part of the femur of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.
38:18It was dug up in a temple at Nicarea, near Sparta.
38:23This is one of only two fossilized bones of this sort that are known from Greek sanctuaries.
38:33So this is a really rare and precious object.
38:37It is indeed. It's a very rare discovery.
38:40They would have seen it as a relic, almost certainly of a lost hero,
38:45very much like the way that we see relics of saints displayed in relicaries in churches today.
38:57So it was that fossil bones ended up as tourist attractions across first the Greek and then the Roman world.
39:05Even Caesars might come to gawp.
39:07The Emperor Hadrian, we're told, when a skeleton with kneecaps the size of a discus was exposed on a beach,
39:16embraced and kissed the bones and laid them out.
39:19No wonder then, confronted by such seemingly incontrovertible evidence for the colossal stature of ancient men,
39:29that the Romans should long have clung to their belief in a form of evolution, survival of the unfittest.
39:36400 years on from the birth of Christ and scholars still clung to it.
39:44The older the world becomes, so the smaller will be the bodies of men.
39:50The man who spoke these words was Augustine, a brilliant intellectual living in what is now Tunisia,
39:57even as the Roman Empire was busy imploding all around him.
40:00Tumultuous though the times were, Augustine didn't let them distract him from his excitement at the discovery of an elephant tooth.
40:09Not, however, that Augustine thought that it was an elephant tooth.
40:14In size, as he pointed out, it was as big as a hundred human teeth combined.
40:19No wonder then, that he should have stated confidently,
40:22I believe it belonged to some giant.
40:24Living as he did in the 4th century AD, Augustine's take on this mysterious relic, however, was complex.
40:37He had one foot in the waning world of classical culture, but he was also a Christian, a bishop, a saint.
40:46He knew and loved his Virgil, but he lived to see Rome sacked.
40:49In attempting to explain the mysterious giant's tooth, he looked backwards to the traditions of the Greeks and the Romans.
40:58But he looked forwards as well, to those of the Middle Ages.
41:02As the gods and heroes of the classical world faded before the triumph of the church,
41:08so new explanations for the existence of huge fossilised bones took their place.
41:13This time, they were derived from the Bible.
41:17Of course, the scholars of the Middle Ages, like the philosophers and biologists of ancient Greece,
41:24had no real idea just how ancient life on earth really was.
41:28But they weren't wholly lacking a notion of a vanished age that had belonged to beings larger and more exotic than themselves.
41:36These creatures, like the heroes of ancient Greece, were human.
41:41Colossally human.
41:44Giants.
41:48But where had these giants gone?
41:51The answer to that, so people in the Middle Ages believed,
41:55was to be found in the greatest cataclysm ever to afflict humanity.
41:59Noah s flood.
42:01Now, the animals may have gone in two by two, but not everyone got out of the rain.
42:07There were giants in the earth in those days.
42:10So we're told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, about the world that preceded Noah s flood.
42:16And sometimes, in the course of exploration or of excavation, people would find the bones of these same giants.
42:22Augustine was one of the first, but certainly not the last, to explain fossils in terms of the flood.
42:31In 1342, for instance, a cave was discovered in southern Italy that contained the skeleton of a man 400 feet tall.
42:39Or so we are told by the great medieval writer Boccaccio.
42:42To display their discovery to posterity, the citizens of Tripani strung the bones on a wire and carried them to a church.
42:55Not every wonder discovered in rock, however, was to be explained as the relic of a vanished giant.
43:00What, for instance, were good Christians to make of mysterious footprints like these?
43:08We now know that these bird-like tracks discovered in Oxfordshire were left by the ancestors of carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus.
43:16But it's no wonder that back in the Middle Ages, when similar prints were discovered in locations ranging from Poland to the Alps,
43:25that some rather diabolical explanations should have been provided.
43:31Whence comest thou? God asks Satan in the Bible.
43:35Back comes the answer.
43:37From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
43:42Indeed, so closely associated with the devil were the footprints of prehistoric creatures,
43:48that it was not unknown for attempts to be made to neutralise their malign power
43:53by incorporating them into the fabric of a church, as here at Bebbington in Cheshire.
43:58But satanic walkabouts weren't the only explanation for dinosaur tracks that seem to have grown up in the Middle Ages.
44:04As in the East, so in the West, people told tales of dragons.
44:11Those of Europe, however, unlike those of China, were malign.
44:16Worthy trophies for a passing hero.
44:19Indeed, dinosaur footprints have been found beside the Rhine in the very spot traditionally associated with Fafnir,
44:27the gold-guarding dragon slain by Siegfried and immortalised in the opera by Richard Wagner.
44:35Nice to think that a dinosaur's plod through a Jurassic swamp might have contributed to the Ring Cycle.
44:41In fact, so vividly did dragons haunt the imaginations of Germans in the Middle Ages,
44:50that in 1335, when this huge skull was dug up outside the Austrian town of Klagenfurt,
44:56the locals had no doubt what it was.
44:58The story goes that once, back in the early days of the town, a nearby swamp was the haunt of a monstrous serpent.
45:07Until a bold knight, as bold knights tended to do back in those days, decided to take the dragon on.
45:14So what the knight did was he got hold of a cow, he stuffed it full of quicklime, and then he used the cow as bait.
45:20The dragon came roaring down, devoured the cow, the quicklime ignited, the dragon exploded, and bang!
45:30Klagenfurt had been made safe for civilisation.
45:34Two and a half centuries on from the discovery of the mysterious skull,
45:38and the legend had only improved in the telling.
45:41So much so, that in 1590, the good folk of Klagenfurt were inspired to commission this.
45:48Once again, a fossilised bone inspired a fabulous creation, this time in three dimensions,
45:56which I suppose begs an obvious question.
45:59To what creature had the skull dug up in 1335 actually belonged?
46:05The answer, not a dragon, but a woolly rhinoceros.
46:10And this forlorn spot north of the town was where it had breathed its last.
46:14There's a sense then, in which the sculpture, fashioned within the lifetimes of Galileo and Francis Bacon,
46:23might seem a last spasm of medieval superstition.
46:27But that, I think, would be unfair.
46:29Yes, it looks back to a time when people thought that dragons and giants had actually existed.
46:37But it looks ahead, as well, to something that we can almost recognise as modern paleontology.
46:44This, after all, is not a monster conjured up purely from the imagination.
46:52It constitutes, however inadequately, the oldest surviving reconstruction of a prehistoric beast.
47:01A century on, and to scholars touched by the dawning rays of the Enlightenment,
47:11talk of dragons or giants was becoming an embarrassment.
47:14In 1683, when the world's original university museum, the Ashmolean, first opened its doors in this Oxford building,
47:25a mysterious bone dug up near the village of Cornwell was one of its prize exhibits.
47:30In his book, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, Robert Plott, the first keeper of the Ashmolean, tried to work out what the bone had come from.
47:42First, he speculates that it was the bone of an elephant brought to Britain by the Romans.
47:47And actually, how he sort of eliminates this as an option is, in 1676, the year before his book is published,
47:53an elephant is actually exhibited in Oxford as part of a travelling menagerie.
47:58And you can imagine Plott going up to the elephant itself and pulling out his tape measure and measuring it,
48:05and actually comparing it to the bone that he had in hand.
48:07He determines that they're different, they're different in shape and size, and he eliminates that as an option.
48:12He very quickly also eliminates horse and ox as viable candidates, and he concludes in the end,
48:18basically, with the only other conclusion that he could draw, was that it was the bone of a giant.
48:23This is the illustration in Plott's book of the mysterious relic. The original has vanished.
48:30In 1763, when a scholar named Richard Brooks inspected it and gave it, in the most up-to-date scientific style,
48:37an imposing classical name, he called it, what else? Scrotum humanum.
48:43Now, reflected in this name was the fact that Brooks, although he knew he wasn't really dealing with a pair of unfeasibly large testicles,
48:50still had no idea what kind of creature his scrotum humanum had actually been.
48:57Like the ancient Greeks, like the Christians of the Middle Ages, Brooks and his contemporaries had not the faintest notion
49:05just how fabulously ancient the planet truly was.
49:08But all that was about to change, and fossilised bones, no longer embarrassments, would be enshrined as prize exhibits in a scientific revolution.
49:21In 1788, a Scottish geologist named James Hutton published an almost literally epical book,
49:29in which he proposed that the Earth was infinitely more ancient than humanity.
49:34Indeed, Hutton could find no evidence for there having been a creation at all.
49:38The result, he declared, of our present inquiry, is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
49:50The implications of this theory for the study of ancient beasts were not long in being felt.
49:55Between 1815 and the early 1820s, a whole series of fossils were uncovered by men quarrying for slate
50:13down mineshafts like this, at Stonesfield, north of Oxford.
50:17So this narrow, cramped passageway is where slate was mined for the roofs of Oxford Colleges and Cotswold Cottages.
50:32And it's where, in the course of that mining, the teeth, the bones of a mysterious and monstrous beast were found.
50:41And the significance of these finds is precisely that they were made down here underground,
50:50because it meant that the origins of these bones could be very precisely identified to a particular layer in the sequence of rocks.
51:03Whatever the creature was that these fossils had come from, one thing was absolutely clear.
51:09It was old. It was very, very old.
51:15The bones belonged to the same mysterious creature that Richard Brooks had named Scrotum Humanum.
51:21But now there was to be no talk of giant's testicles.
51:26This was because the fragments ended up in the hands of the man perhaps best qualified in the whole of Britain to identify them.
51:33A clergyman named William Buckland, who also just happened to be Oxford's Professor of Geology.
51:42What Buckland deduced was that the fossilised bones had belonged to a very carnivorous and very large lizard, a Megalosaurus.
51:51By 1822, the name had appeared for the first time in print.
51:58The animal, identified by Buckland, must in some instances have attained a length of 40 feet and stood 8 feet high.
52:05The notion that such a monster might once have wandered over Oxfordshire was, of course, a thrilling one.
52:13With the remains of other, similar giant lizards simultaneously being found elsewhere across southern England,
52:24it opened up, to the eyes of the public, a quite staggering prospect.
52:27Once, it seemed, in the chillingly unfathomable reaches of a pre-human past, there had existed an entire world of savage reptiles, red in tooth and claw.
52:42Time, cruel time, come and subdue that brow.
52:47Quite how the existence, millions upon millions of years ago, of ravening Megalosaurs was to be squared with the Biblical chronology that had man being fashioned by a loving God on the sixth day of creation,
53:04was, for theologians, a most unexpected and alarming poser.
53:09Buckland was merely the first of many clergymen to wrestle with the implications.
53:14Certainly, the discovery of so many fossils opened a vista of monsters to the wide eyes of the Victorian public that compared with anything in the Bible or Greek mythology.
53:29Dragons of the prime, as the great poet Tennyson put it, that tear each other in the slime.
53:36Except, of course, that dragons was precisely what they were not.
53:41The scientist who came up with a name for them was this man, Richard Owen.
53:47When he wasn't busy founding the Natural History Museum in London and being quite sensationally rude to all his colleagues,
53:54Owen had a day job as Britain's leading anatomist.
53:57Megalosaurus, and creatures like it, he announced, had ranked not merely as lizards but as terrible lizards, in Greek, dinosaurs.
54:10The name reflected the two sides of Owen's complex personality.
54:15The brilliant anatomist, who had correctly extrapolated from a few scattered bones an entire kingdom of vanished creatures,
54:23and the devout Anglican, awestruck before the revelation of just how stupefying God's creations had always been.
54:31Nor was Owen alone in his wonder.
54:36Within a decade of his first use of the word, dinosaurs had become a veritable craze.
54:42In 1854, Owen himself and an associate, the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, blazed what would prove a popular trail.
54:51They opened a dinosaur theme park.
54:55And here it still stands, Crystal Palace in South London.
55:13When Hawkins explained his motives for sculpting this Mesozoic wonderland,
55:17he did so in words that not only foreshadow Jurassic Park, but also echo the myth-making of our ancestors.
55:25His aim, he declared, was,
55:28the revivifying of the ancient world, to call up from the abyss of time and from the depths of the earth,
55:34those vast forms and gigantic beasts which the almighty creator designed to inhabit and precede us,
55:41in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain.
55:47No wonder then, that he and Owen wanted to include this particular beauty.
55:53So what we have here is none other than Megalosaurus itself.
55:59Except that, as paleontologists have long appreciated, it actually looked nothing like this.
56:05Megalosaurus was not built like a people carrier.
56:08In point of fact, it was a theropod, a two-legged proto-tyrannosaur, which means that it looked like this.
56:19And that's why when I was a child I made a point of refusing every offer from my parents to take me to Crystal Palace.
56:26These reconstructions offended every bone in my dino-geek body.
56:33But, now that I'm here, I can realise what a little prig I was being.
56:41This model, built of concrete, may not be cutting-edge paleontology, but it tells you everything about why dinosaurs still fascinate us.
56:54About the sense of awe and smallness we feel when we contemplate the immensity of geological time.
57:00And about how extraordinary it is, considering the millions upon millions of years that separate us from the Mesozoic, that we know anything about dinosaurs at all.
57:10The achievements of paleontology, ever since the heroic pioneering days of Buckland and Owen, have certainly been astounding.
57:18And recent finds, especially in China, have opened up new worlds of wonder and fascination.
57:25But there is a sense, perhaps, in which we are not, after all, so wholly far removed from those who saw in fossils the remains of thunderbirds, or griffins, or dragons, or giants.
57:40Our understanding of dinosaurs today is defined for us by the discoveries of scientists.
57:47And yet, the nature of the fossil record being what it is, those same scientists will never be able to fill in all the gaps.
57:58And so it is, into those same gaps, that we, just as our ancestors did, project all our manifold obsessions, as variable and contradictory as human society itself.
58:09It turns out that the science fiction stories were right all along.
58:15Just when you think you've got dinosaurs pinned down, they always break free.
58:19Always break free.
58:28Unearthing the worlds, we left behind more remarkable discoveries in the secrets below the surface.
58:35A special collection of programmes on BBC iPlayer.
58:37On BBC iPlayer.
58:38On BBC iPlayer.
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