- 7 weeks ago
- #dinosaurs
- #monsters
Documentary, Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters
#Dinosaurs #Monsters
#Dinosaurs #Monsters
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
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.
00:36When people in the past came across the fossilised bones of large vanished animals,
00:40it begged any number of questions. What sort of creatures could they possibly have come from?
00:46How old were these skeletal remains? Above all, perhaps, what did they mean?
00:52Just like us, ancient peoples were fascinated by the giant bones they found in the ground.
01:00Like us, they obsessed about their origins.
01:06In this programme, I'm going to explore the ways in which our ancestors sought to make sense of the
01:10remains of dinosaurs and other giant prehistoric creatures, and how they tried to reconcile such
01:16finds with their own understanding of life on earth. That these explanations were wrong doesn't mean that
01:25they deserve our contempt. Just the opposite. Science begins in wonder and a yearning to fathom what may
01:31at first seem unfathomable. In that sense, at any rate, our ancestors did have something of the
01:37paleontologists about them. And in one fundamental respect, they were absolutely spot on. Monsters had
01:45indeed once trodden the earth.
01:56I made this masterpiece when I was five, and looking at it now, I think, well, I was never going to cut it as
02:03a sculptor. But I do remember the intensity of yearning, a kind of love, really, that went into
02:12the making of it. How desperately I wanted to see a dinosaur.
02:21Going 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
02:32trees. A horned and crested triceratops making the fields shake. And of course, if I was feeling
02:42particularly ghoulish, a blood-bislathered tyrannosaur. Why was the present day so dull?
02:52Why didn't I live in a world full of swamps and pterosaurs and perpetually exploding volcanoes?
03:04Why couldn't my life be Mesozoic?
03:08And in a way, all my prayers have been answered. 35 years too late for my seven-year-old self.
03:14But visit a museum today, and the displays have never been more animatronic.
03:19Nor, for 65 million years, has flesh been put more convincingly on the bones of dinosaurs,
03:29like this Tyrannosaurus rex.
03:36CGI. The dinosaur lover's best friend.
03:39Now, the truth is, of course, that no human being has ever seen a living dinosaur.
03:51This is the Peabody Museum in New Haven, on the east coast of the United States.
03:56It contains this fabulous mural, painted in the 1940s. Dinosaurs first appear here, around 230 million years ago.
04:08And they last another 160 million years, right the way up to there, where no more dinosaurs.
04:15Of course, there are no humans anywhere in this mural. Homo 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,
04:45our prehistoric ancestors were always being shown alongside dinosaurs.
04:50Total fantasy? Of course. But still, it made me wonder.
04:54When cavemen came across the bones of dinosaurs, what did they make of them?
05:02It's an abiding mystery. By definition, they wrote nothing down.
05:05But there were some prehistoric peoples, for all that, who survived into historic times.
05:13Take North America, for instance, where hunter-gatherer tribes that for generations
05:17had been roaming the Great Plains, had 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, with a high regard for the scientific
05:33abilities of the native peoples who lived in America before Columbus.
05:37Peoples who, by and large, were pre-literate, prehistoric.
05:44Their theories and their speculations and their myths, oral traditions, preserved in oral traditions
05:49over generations, over thousands of years, they were based on observation over time.
05:55They knew anatomy. They compared. They tried to imagine the creatures while alive, how they behaved,
06:03what they looked like, what kind of habitat. They actually had a sense of deep time.
06:08They 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.
06:30Even 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. And among those pricking up their ears were scientists such as Othniel Charles Marsh,
06:47the first director of the Peabody Museum.
06:51Marsh was one of the first great paleontologists and a genuine pioneer. He rode shotgun on the Great Plains,
06:57he hung out with Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and he was adopted as a blood brother by the Sioux.
07:04Wakasa Pahihuhu, they called him. He who digs up bones.
07:12Many of the dinosaurs in the Peabody were dug up in the 1870s, a time when the West really was very wild.
07:20Among the collection are the first specimens ever found of iconic species, like Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus,
07:30the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus.
07:37Marsh's expeditions took him to the Badlands. There, in his hunt for fossils,
07:42he was drawing on the very latest in scientific research. But some of his sources were altogether more prehistoric.
07:51The Sioux, and other Native American peoples too, told stories of mysterious beasts, supernatural creatures,
08:00whose bones might be found scattered across the ground. But what had prompted these legends?
08:06From the Sioux, Marsh learned the legend of Thunderhorses, creatures that galloped over storm clouds and made them echo with the crashing of their hooves.
08:19His fascination with such stories helped to win him the trust of Native Americans.
08:25In 1874, at a time of great tension, when the whites were encroaching on their lands, Marsh was able to employ a Sioux as his guide.
08:33He learned about some impressive bones found by the tribe. They said they were from strange creatures
08:41that had once lived in the land of the Sioux. Bones now turned to stone.
08:47Marsh was shown the bones of this magnificent beast, a colossal mammal some 12 feet long,
08:53which had lived around 35 million years ago, and was indeed, amazingly enough, a relative of the horse.
09:00This is the very specimen that was shown to Marsh, and in honour of the legends of the Thunderhorse told him by the Sioux,
09:09he named the creature a Brontotherium, a Thunderbeast.
09:17Most intriguing of all, perhaps, were the tales told across the Great Plains, not of Thunderhorses,
09:23but of Thunderbirds. Stories passed down the generations and still retold today.
09:31Long, long ago, when the two-leggeds were new to walking on Mother Earth,
09:37the Thunderbirds were their friends and advisers. They were great beasts, with wingspans as long as two war canoes.
09:47They had sharp pointed beaks, with sharp pointed teeth, and they lived in the sky, on the edge of the clouds.
09:59Many of these legends tell how the Thunderbirds had, as their deadliest enemies, giant aquatic monsters.
10:06Now, at this same time, lived the water monsters. They were huge, shaped like a snake, with feet.
10:20They had a big horn on their head, and spikes on the tip of their tail.
10:26It's surely suggestive that the stories often derive from regions of America which once,
10:33back in the age of the dinosaurs, were indeed covered by seas. Nowadays, the Great Plains
10:40consist of weathered sediment, complete with the skeletons of long-necked, marine reptiles called
10:45plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs, flying reptiles of the kind that were always carrying off Raquel Welch.
10:52And what do we find in Marsh's collection? A plesiosaur, and a pterosaur, a pteranodon.
11:02What all this suggests is an intriguing possibility.
11:07Almost all of the tribes had stories about water monsters and sky creatures, Thunderbirds.
11:13And, of course, these are personified violent forces of nature. Thunder and lightning, very powerful
11:22forces of nature, and then flooding, which was supposedly caused by water monsters.
11:28And when they found very large bones, fossilized bones, of extinct creatures eroding and weathering
11:36out of riverbanks and lake shores, they naturally thought that they must have been water creatures.
11:43And then when they also found fossilized shells and fish and turtles,
11:48they understood that this land had once been underwater.
11:52Now, it's not only on the Great Plains of America that we find evidence for a fascination
11:57on the part of pre-literate societies with the bones of vanished creatures.
12:02Go back far enough in time, and you find it on the opposite side of the Atlantic as well, in Greece.
12:09First and greatest of the Greek poets was Homer, but the two poems he wrote down some 2,800 years ago,
12:21the Iliad and the Odyssey, almost certainly contained material far older than that.
12:28Perhaps then, even before the time of Homer himself, people were telling the story of one
12:34of the most celebrated monsters in all Greek mythology.
12:37The story? Well, it's a thriller. The hero Odysseus, in his wanderings across the wine-dark sea,
12:45finds himself trapped in a cave by a hideous monster, a monster that snacks on human flesh
12:51and has, in its forehead, just a single circular eye. It's a cyclops.
13:02What is the trapped Odysseus to do? Well, he gets the cyclops drunk.
13:08Then he and his men take a large spike, they aim it over the cyclops' single eye.
13:15In goes the spike. Splat goes the eye.
13:21Who could doubt the truth of such a story when there was evidence of the tale to be found in the earth?
13:30Now, of course, this isn't actually the skull of a one-eyed monster.
13:35It's the skull of an elephant, and this is the large nasal opening from which its trunk once extended.
13:44The Greeks didn't become familiar with real live elephants until the 4th century BC,
13:49long after the story of the cyclops first emerged.
13:52But we know from the fossil record that prehistoric species of elephant lived on Mediterranean islands
14:02long before humans were around.
14:06When ancient Greeks came across the preserved fossil skulls of these creatures,
14:10eroded from the rocks or perhaps dug up by a farmer,
14:13did they mistake the outsized skull for a giant's head
14:17and the large nasal cavity as a huge single eye socket?
14:25Is this what inspired Homer's tale of the island-dwelling giant cyclops?
14:32Now, no ancient source directly confirms the cyclops theory, but it seems eminently plausible nevertheless.
14:39Not only were there large bones to be found scattered across the entire sweep of the Mediterranean,
14:45but 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.
14:55On a few occasions, ancient writers wrote down what they thought of large bones.
15:02They are among the earliest surviving written records of paleontological knowledge.
15:07Take this, from The Life of Apollonius, by Philostratus.
15:14I agree that giants once existed,
15:17because gigantic bodies are revealed all over Earth when mounds are broken open.
15:25This is the site of what, back in classical times,
15:40was one of the most celebrated buildings in the entire Greek world,
15:44the 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.
15:59But where had they come from?
16:01Well, as everyone on Samos knew, their island had been the scene,
16:05way back in ancient times, of a quite spectacular battle.
16:09One that had been fought between an army of ferocious female warriors called Amazons,
16:14and the god Dionysus.
16:16And what had Dionysus brought with him as backup?
16:19Nothing less than a war train of elephants.
16:32Panima, the ancients called for site of this battle.
16:36The blood-soaked field.
16:37And its location?
16:43Well, its location seems to have been here.
16:48The soil, which elsewhere on Samos is a dirty white,
16:51here you can see is the colour of dried blood.
16:54And on either side of it, hills that are absolutely stuffed with prehistoric elephant bones.
17:04So what that implies is that this site was witness to an absolutely key event in the history of
17:11paleontology.
17:12The ancients who came across the bones here and explained them as the remains of elephants,
17:18were blazing a trail that would be followed by 18th century by 19th century paleontologists.
17:24For the very first time, the fossils of long-lost megafauna were being identified correctly.
17:31Nor was that the limit of ancient Greek paleontological achievement.
17:35Take the evidence on this Corinthian vase from the 6th century BC, now in a Boston museum.
17:43Here's a brave hero, Heracles, coming to the rescue of Hisione, a princess of Troy,
17:50who is being menaced by a monster.
17:52Most art historians and specialist-based paintings had identified this monster as a very poorly drawn
18:00sea monster peeking out of a cave. To 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.
18:12So this monster looks the way it does not because the artist was rubbish at drawing monsters.
18:17You think that it might actually be the fossil of an actual beast?
18:22Well, 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. And so I think the artist was actually a good artist,
18:32and he's given us a very good rendering of what a fossil skull would look like as it weathers out of a cliff.
18:40I think the model might have been a samotherium, which is a giant giraffe species.
18:46They lived in the Miocene. They left a lot of fossils in the Aegean on the islands in mainland Greece.
18:53That would be a very common fossil. Paleontologists noticed the large empty eye socket, the broken
19:00away nasal area, which is a very realistic rendition of a skull that's been in the ground for a long time.
19:07The jagged teeth, the back of the skull, it really matches what a samotherium skull looked like.
19:15This appears to be the oldest surviving artistic representation of a fossil in Greek art.
19:22So what we have here is an object that has absolutely key significance in the history of paleontology.
19:27I think it's a really powerful evidence that fossils did influence the way Greeks thought about their myths.
19:35For it to have been drawn so realistically, the skull must have been in good condition.
19:40But how did the Greeks think it had been preserved like that in rock?
19:44One possible answer can be found in the story of a second princess rescued from a monster.
19:50This is a book that used to belong to my grandmother and if I open it here,
19:57there is a fabulous picture by the Victorian artist Lord Layton.
20:03And yes, it's true, there's a half-naked woman tied to a rock.
20:07But when I first came across this book back in my grandmother's house,
20:10I was still of an age to be far more interested in the fact that here was what seemed to be a dinosaur.
20:17In fact, it's a sea monster that was sent to ravage Joppa in what is now Israel,
20:23after the local queen had been foolish enough to insult Poseidon, the god of the sea.
20:28And the naked woman is Andromeda, the queen's daughter,
20:31who is being offered to the monster in an attempt to calm Poseidon down.
20:37But no need to panic, because here comes the hero Perseus,
20:41armed with a gorgon's head, and anyone who looks at the head is immediately turned to stone.
20:48And this, as you can see from the painting, is precisely the mistake that the monster has made.
20:54Andromeda was saved, and the monster? Well, the monster was turned to stone, just like a fossil.
21:02All of which raises an intriguing possibility. Was the whole story of the gorgon's head
21:10an attempt by the Greeks to explain what would otherwise have been inexplicable wonders?
21:15Colossal skeletons, fashioned out of rock. Certainly, one thing is clear.
21:23Giant fossilised monsters, back in classical times as now, made for phenomenal box office.
21:30In 58 BC, when a flamboyant showman by the name of Marcus Aemilius Scourus returned home after a spell
21:38throwing his weight around in Judea, he brought with him a giant fossil, which he claimed to have been
21:45the very monster turned to stone by Perseus. The monster, we are told, was over 40 feet long.
21:52The height of its ribs was greater than that of an Indian elephant, and its spine was one and a half feet
21:58thick. Now, we have no idea what it was that Scourus had actually brought back with him the fossil of some
22:05prehistoric beast. Clearly, a giant whale perhaps, or even, it may be, some composite monster,
22:12fashioned out of a whole assortment of fossilised remains.
22:16But of one thing we can be absolutely confident. It wasn't a dinosaur. All the giant bones found
22:25across the Mediterranean came from mammals. Elephants, rhinoceroses, samotheriums.
22:33We know this because the rocks that contain them are of relatively recent origin,
22:38say, eight million years old. To contain the bones of dinosaurs,
22:43they would have had to be more than eight times that age.
22:49But what about dinosaur remains outside the Mediterranean? Did the Greeks know anything
22:55about them? Adrian Meyer thinks they did. And for someone like me, whose childhood craze for
23:01dinosaurs evolved seamlessly into an obsession with the ancient Greeks, it's a completely gripping theory.
23:09The Greeks might have had knowledge of dinosaur remains if they travelled further east along the
23:15Silk Roots, where there are dinosaur remains, much farther east than the Mediterranean world.
23:22Beyond the land of the Scythians, a people who inhabited a vast stretch of Central Asia,
23:28there rose a steepling chain of mountains. So reports Herodotus, a Greek historian of the 5th century BC.
23:36And beyond these mountains, there exist mysterious creatures called griffins.
23:43Herodotus reported stories that he heard from the Scythian nomads. They told him about griffins,
23:51strange creatures with beaks, forelegs, nests on the ground for their eggs.
23:57That guarded the gold deposits that the Scythians mined and prospected. These creatures were fearsome.
24:07They preyed on horses and miners.
24:11Looking at the way Greeks represented griffins, as in this fine collection on Samos,
24:17you might think that these were fantastical creatures, the product of overheated imaginations.
24:22But that was not the understanding of the Greeks themselves.
24:27The early travellers may have been shown fossils of dinosaurs to support those stories of a beaked
24:34creature with forelegs and burrows, nests on the ground, near the gold, guarding the gold, actually.
24:42Now, in the Gobi Desert, east of the Altai Mountains, there stretches one of the richest hunting grounds for
24:50dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world.
24:52In 1922, when an American adventurer, a kind of proto-Indiana Jones named Roy Chapman Andrews,
25:02made the first paleontological survey of the region, he and his men were astounded by what they found.
25:09Fossils, he reported, were strewn over the surface almost as thickly as stones.
25:15The desert was positively paved with bones.
25:19Most astounding of all, there were nests.
25:23Nests filled with eggs.
25:25The very first dinosaur eggs ever found.
25:33This film shows the creature who laid them.
25:35It was a distant ancestor of one of the most celebrated dinosaurs ever found in the Wild West,
25:42the three-horned living tank Triceratops.
25:46And so, perhaps not surprisingly, it was named Protoceratops.
25:51And if it seems to resemble descriptions given by Greek writers of the Griffin,
25:55well, perhaps it's not entirely coincidence.
25:59And there's further evidence for the link between dinosaur bones and griffins.
26:04We're told by Theseus, a Greek physician at the court of the Persian king in the 5th century BC,
26:10griffins are a race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.
26:19The Scythians described griffins as combining the features of birds and mammals.
26:25They were attempting to describe accurately the fossils that they saw, fossils of dinosaurs,
26:31things that they had never seen alive. And the fossils of the dinosaurs, protoceratops dinosaurs,
26:36combine the features of mammalian, four-legged creature, predator,
26:42with the beak of a raptor or an eagle, a bird of some sort.
26:47If Mayer's protoceratops as bird-like monster theory is accurate,
26:51and it's received wide support both from classicists and from paleontologists,
26:56then it suggests something really rather remarkable.
27:02The mural in the Peabody is called The Age of Reptiles.
27:05It shows us dinosaurs as terrible lizards.
27:08But the ancient nomads of Mongolia, it seems,
27:11recognised in protoceratops not a reptile, but a kind of bird,
27:15which prefigures what is pretty much the consensus of scientists today.
27:22The notion that birds are so closely related to dinosaurs that they are, in fact,
27:26a kind of dinosaur themselves, is one that's been fundamentally shaped by recent discoveries in Asia.
27:33So how haunting it is to see in the fabulously ancient figure of the griffin
27:39a possible foreshadowing of insights that embody the absolute paleontological cutting edge.
27:48And just maybe, griffins weren't the only mythical creatures to have been inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones.
27:57In China, the figure of the dragon was for millennia an emblem of the emperor,
28:03and it remains to this day a potent symbol of Chinese identity and culture.
28:09The 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?
28:24Were dragons ancient China's attempt to explain the mystery of outsized bones?
28:30The bones of dinosaurs such as those that today are known as Qingdaosaurus, Yangtuanosaurus.
28:40Or Cinosauropteryx.
28:43The evidence, as you might expect, is, to put it mildly, circumstantial.
28:48All the same, a fascinating demonstration of just how potent the hole can be
28:54of fossils on the Chinese imagination came to light only a few years ago.
28:58In 2006, in central China, paleontologists discovered that the remains of dinosaurs were being dug up and sold as dragon bones.
29:09900 grams were going for the equivalent of 50p.
29:15Villagers told the paleontologists that they had been excavating the seam of fossils for a couple of decades.
29:21But the antiquity of Chinese medical practices suggests that the attribution of dinosaur bones
29:28to dragons may reach very much further back in time.
29:34Certainly, what we do know is that in China, dragons have been associated with health
29:40and good fortune for millennia.
29:44Ancient recipes employing the fossilized bones of large prehistoric mammals,
29:48and probably dinosaurs too, are included in the Chinese Materia Medica,
29:53a compendia of centuries-old traditional medicine.
29:57The size of the bones that are recorded in the Materia Medica,
30:02they're clearly large bones and not of ordinary mammals.
30:07And they would have been given tremendous significance in the Materia Medica,
30:11in a culture which believed in the reality of dragons.
30:15These large bones were clearly at a premium.
30:19This is one of the earliest recipes to mention dragon bones.
30:22First recorded in the third century BC.
30:26What you do is that you grind the bones to dust and you mix them with various herbal medicines.
30:36Then you eviscerate two swallows and you pack the bone, which is now fine dust,
30:41into 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.
30:52So let's put our bag inside and let it boil.
30:58So it's like a tea bag.
31:01Like a tea bag, exactly.
31:02So we're expecting all the essence of these various herbs to come out of the bag into the surroundings.
31:09Chris Duffin, a historian of geology and folklore, made tea for me following the ancient recipe,
31:15but omitting the eviscerated swallow.
31:17He didn't recommend I drink it, though.
31:20One of the herbal ingredients, not the powdered bone, turns out to be highly toxic.
31:29When Huang Di, the first emperor, died more than 4,000 years ago,
31:33his admirers declared that he had risen into the heavens in the form of a dragon.
31:40An intriguing thought that long before scientists gave Tyrannosaurus his surname of Rex,
31:45the Latin word for king, royalty in dinosaurs might have been paired up in ancient China.
31:55Nor is it only in China that big bones were believed by the ancients to bring good luck.
32:01The Greeks too, when they weren't listening to travellers' tales about griffins,
32:05might be busy harvesting fossils themselves.
32:08In Greece, giant, petrified bones were seen as talismans that might bring power,
32:14prestige, even victory in battle.
32:19The best example comes from a war that featured a Tyrannosaur among the cities of ancient Greece,
32:26Sparta.
32:27Now, most Greeks, relative to the Spartans, were herbivores,
32:31which isn't to say they were exactly wusses.
32:33When 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,
32:42and they would use them to make a phalanx, out of which would bristle their spears,
32:47the equivalent of a Triceratops' horns.
32:49When they met with another city's phalanx, they would charge one another,
32:56and 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.
33:15The very earth would shake to the rhythm of their metronomic approach.
33:18As they emerged through the dust of battle, they would reveal a terrifying wall of scarlet and bronze.
33:26When they charged, it wouldn't necessarily be a full frontal attack.
33:31The Spartans, unlike other Greeks, had the training that enabled them to launch their wings in a flanking action.
33:38Their aim? To attack the vulnerable sides of an enemy phalanx and shred it to pieces.
33:45Their style of battle, I suppose, was like that of a tyrannosaur.
34:00Not 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.
34:16But 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.
34:25In 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.
34:42They'd been told, you see, by an oracle that they would only ever conquer Tegea
34:46if they could first capture a skeleton, the bones of an ancient prince called Orestes.
34:51Orestes had the kind of dysfunctional family background that the ancient Greeks loved in their heroes.
34:58His mum had killed his dad. He'd killed his mum. Outsize events.
35:04And so who was to say that Orestes had not been outsize as well?
35:08And 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?
35:21Well, just a bit of a stretch, you might have thought.
35:25Except that, sure enough, it turned out that the Spartans' hunch had been spot on.
35:30The bones were dug up, smuggled to Sparta, shown off, then reinterred.
35:35Shortly afterwards, the Tegeans submitted to the mastery of their hated neighbours.
35:42A resounding triumph for Sparta's military palaeontological complex.
35:51So, what was the skeleton? Almost certainly not the bones of Orestes.
35:57We 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.
36:09All of which makes for a puzzle.
36:12Why 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.
36:26Heroes 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
36:38metaphysical speculations, they had no real understanding of the vastness of time that had
36:44preceded the appearance of humans on Earth. What they did have, however, was a sense that humanity
36:50had evolved and changed over time, albeit not in a way that Darwin would have recognised.
36:57To classical thinkers, it was a fundamental presumption that everything was going to the dogs.
37:02What had once been a golden age was now an age of iron. The human race, originally a breed of heroes,
37:10had degenerated and diminished and ended up literally dwarvish.
37:19And what had served to give the Greeks this particular notion? Of course, in a sense, it's just
37:25human nature to presume that things were better in the good old days. But the Greeks weren't just drawing
37:30on a gut conservatism for their understanding of the distant past. They had evidence for it, such as the
37:37outsized bones dug up at Tegaea by the Spartans. The people of Samos may have identified the elephant
37:45bones on their island correctly, but most Greeks, confronted by a giant fossil, would like as not
37:52believe it to be the remains of some legendary giant hero. Indeed, so widespread was this presumption that
38:01the relics of renowned big hitters such as Theseus or Ajax became must-have accessories for any temple
38:08keen to make its mark. Here is one of those venerated giant bones, now recognised to be part of the femur
38:18of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros. It was dug up in a temple at Nicarea, near Sparta. This is one of only
38:26two fossilised bones of this sort that are known from Greek sanctuaries. So this is a really rare and
38:36precious object. It is indeed. It's a very rare discovery. They would have seen it as a relic,
38:42almost certainly of a lost hero, very much like the way that we see relics of saints displayed in
38:54relicaries in churches today. So it was that fossil bones ended up as tourist attractions across first
39:03the Greek and then the Roman world. Even Caesar's might come to gawp. The Emperor Hadrian, we're told,
39:11when a skeleton with kneecaps the size of a discus was exposed on a beach, embraced and kissed the bones
39:19and laid them out. No wonder then, confronted by such seemingly incontrovertible evidence for the colossal
39:27statue of ancient men that the Romans should long have clung to their belief in a form of evolution,
39:35survival of the unfittest.
39:40400 years on from the birth of Christ and scholars still clung to it.
39:45The 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,
39:58even as the Roman Empire was busy imploding all around him.
40:03Tumultuous though the times were, Augustine didn't let them distract him from his excitement at the
40:07discovery of an elephant tooth. Not, 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. No wonder then,
40:21that he should have stated confidently, I believe it belonged to some giant.
40:27Living as he did in the 4th century AD, Augustine's take on this mysterious relic, however, was complex.
40:34He 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. In attempting to explain the
40:52mysterious 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,
41:09so new explanations for the existence of huge fossilised bones took their place.
41:15This time, they were derived from the Bible. Of course, the scholars of the Middle Ages,
41:21like the philosophers and biologists of ancient Greece, had no real idea just how ancient life on
41:27earth really was, but they weren't wholly lacking a notion of a vanished age that had belonged to
41:33beings larger and more exotic than themselves. These creatures, like the heroes of ancient Greece,
41:41were human. Colossally human. Giants.
41:46But where had these giants gone? The answer to that, so people in the Middle Ages believed,
41:55was to be found in the greatest cataclysm ever to afflict humanity, Noah s flood.
42:02Now, the animals may have gone in two by two, but not everyone got out of the rain.
42:08There were giants in the earth in those days.
42:11So we're told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, about the world that preceded Noah s flood.
42:17And sometimes, in the course of exploration or of excavation,
42:21people would find the bones of these same giants.
42:25Augustine 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
42:37a man 400 feet tall, or so we are told by the great medieval writer Boccaccio.
42:44To display their discovery to posterity,
42:46the citizens of Trapani strung the bones on a wire and carried them to a church.
42:52Not every wonder discovered in rock, however, was to be explained as the relic of a vanished giant.
43:02What, for instance, were good Christians to make of mysterious footprints like these?
43:10We now know that these bird-like tracks discovered in Oxfordshire were left by the ancestors of
43:15carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus. But it's no wonder that back in the Middle Ages,
43:20when similar prints were discovered in locations ranging from Poland to the Alps,
43:25that some rather diabolical explanations should have been provided.
43:32Whence comest thou? God asks Satan in the Bible. Back comes the answer.
43:38From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
43:44Indeed, so closely associated with the devil were the footprints of prehistoric creatures,
43:49that it was not unknown for attempts to be made to neutralise their malign power
43:54by incorporating them into the fabric of a church, as here at Bebbington in Cheshire.
44:00But satanic walkabouts weren't the only explanation for dinosaur tracks that seem to have grown up in
44:05the Middle Ages. As in the East, so in the West. People told tales of dragons. Those of Europe,
44:13however, unlike those of China, were malign. Worthy trophies for a passing hero.
44:21Indeed, dinosaur footprints have been found beside the Rhine in the very spot traditionally associated
44:27with Fafnir, the gold-guarding dragon slain by Siegfried and immortalised in the opera by Richard Wagner.
44:36Nice to think that a dinosaur's plod through a Jurassic swamp might have contributed to the ring cycle.
44:42In 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,
44:57the locals had no doubt what it was.
45:00The story goes that once, back in the early days of the town, a nearby swamp was the haunt of a monstrous
45:07serpent, until a bold knight, as bold knights tended to do back in those days, decided to take the dragon on.
45:15So what the knight did was he got hold of a cow, he stuffed it full of quicklime,
45:19and then he used the cow as bait. The dragon came roaring down, devoured the cow, the quicklime ignited,
45:27the dragon exploded, and bang! Klagenfurt had been made safe for civilisation.
45:34Two and a half centuries on from the discovery of the mysterious skull, and the legend had only
45:40improved in the telling. So much so, that in 1590, the good folk of Klagenfurt were inspired to
45:47commission this. Once again, a fossilised bone inspired a fabulous creation, this time in three
45:55dimensions, which I suppose begs an obvious question. To what creature had the skull dug up in 1335,
46:04actually belonged? The answer, not a dragon, but a woolly rhinoceros. And this forlorn spot north of the town
46:13was where it had breathed its last.
46:17There's a sense then, in which the sculpture, fashioned within the lifetimes of Galileo and Francis Bacon,
46:24might seem a last spasm of medieval superstition. But that, I think, would be unfair.
46:31Yes, it looks back to a time when people thought that dragons and giants had actually existed,
46:38but it looks ahead as well to something that we can almost recognise as modern paleontology.
46:46This, after all, is not a monster conjured up purely from the imagination. It constitutes,
46:55however inadequately, the oldest surviving reconstruction of a prehistoric beast.
47:02A 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
47:24Oxford building, a mysterious bone dug up near the village of Cornwell was one of its prize exhibits.
47:31In his book, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, Robert Plott, the first keeper of the Ashmolean,
47:39tried 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,
47:54an 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
48:05it and actually comparing it to the bone that he had in hand. He determines that they're different,
48:09they'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.
48:24This is the illustration in Plott's book of the mysterious relic. The original has vanished.
48:31In 1763, when a scholar named Richard Brooks inspected it and gave it, in the most up-to-date
48:36scientific style, an imposing classical name, he called it, what else? Scrotum humanum.
48:44Now, reflected in this name was the fact that Brooks, although he knew he wasn't really dealing
48:49with a pair of unfeasibly large testicles, still had no idea what kind of creature
48:54his scrotum humanum had actually been. Like the ancient Greeks, like the Christians of the Middle
49:01Ages, Brooks and his contemporaries had not the faintest notion just how fabulously ancient
49:08the planet truly was. But all that was about to change, and fossilised bones, no longer embarrassments,
49:16would be enshrined as prize exhibits in a scientific revolution.
49:23In 1788, a Scottish geologist named James Hutton published an almost literally epical book in which
49:30he proposed that the earth was infinitely more ancient than humanity. Indeed, Hutton could find
49:36no evidence for there having been a creation at all. The result, he declared, of our present inquiry,
49:43is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
49:51The implications of this theory for the study of ancient beasts were not long in being felt.
49:56Yeah. I can feel my situm humanum.
50:04Between 1815 and the early 1820s, a whole series of fossils were uncovered by men quarrying
50:12for slate down mineshafts like this, at Stonesfield, north of Oxford.
50:24So this narrow, cramped passageway is where slate was mined for the roofs of Oxford Colleges and
50:32Cotswold Cottages, and it's where in the course of that mining, the teeth, the bones of a mysterious
50:40and monstrous beast were found. And the significance of these finds is precisely that they were made
50:48down here underground, because it meant that the origins of these bones could be very precisely
50:58identified to a particular layer in the sequence of rocks. Whatever the creature was that these
51:07fossils had come from, one thing was absolutely clear. It was old. It was very, very old.
51:16The bones belonged to the same mysterious creature that Richard Brooks had named Scrotum Humanum,
51:23but now there was to be no talk of giants' testicles. This was because the fragments ended up in the hands of
51:30the man perhaps best qualified in the whole of Britain to identify them, a clergyman named William
51:37Buckland, who also just happened to be Oxford's Professor of Geology. What Buckland deduced was that
51:45the fossilised bones had belonged to a very carnivorous and very large lizard, a Megalosaurus.
51:52By 1822, the name had appeared for the first time in print. The animal identified by Buckland must in
52:02some instances have attained a length of 40 feet and stood 8 feet high. The notion that such a monster
52:09might once have wandered over Oxfordshire was, of course, a thrilling one.
52:14With the remains of other, similar giant lizards simultaneously being found elsewhere across
52:23southern England, it opened up, to the eyes of the public, a quite staggering prospect.
52:30Once, it seemed, in the chillingly unfathomable reaches of a pre-human past,
52:36there had existed an entire world of savage reptiles, red in tooth and claw.
52:44Time, cruel time, come and subdue that brow.
52:50Quite how the existence millions upon millions of years ago of ravening Megalosaurs was to be squared
52:58with the biblical chronology that had man being fashioned by a loving God on the sixth day of
53:03creation was, for theologians, a most unexpected and alarming poser.
53:09Buckland was merely the first of many clergymen to wrestle with the implications.
53:16Certainly, the discovery of so many fossils opened a vista of monsters to the wide eyes of the
53:22Victorian public that compared with anything in the Bible or Greek mythology.
53:27Dragons of the prime, as the great poet Tennyson put it, that tear each other in the slime.
53:37Except, of course, that dragons was precisely what they were not.
53:42The scientist who came up with a name for them was this man, Richard Owen.
53:49When he wasn't busy founding the Natural History Museum in London and being quite
53:52sensationally rude to all his colleagues, Owen had a day job as Britain's leading anatomist.
53:58Megalosaurus, and creatures like it, he announced, had ranked not merely as lizards, but as terrible lizards.
54:08In Greek, dinosaurs.
54:11The name reflected the two sides of Owen's complex personality.
54:16The brilliant anatomist, who had correctly extrapolated from a few scattered bones an entire
54:21kingdom of vanished creatures, and the devout Anglican, awestruck before the revelation of just how
54:29stupefying God's creations had always been. Nor was Owen alone in his wonder. Within a decade of his
54:38first use of the word, dinosaurs had become a veritable craze. In 1854, Owen himself and an associate,
54:47the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, blazed what would prove a popular trail. They opened a dinosaur
54:54theme park. And here it still stands, Crystal Palace in South London.
55:00When Hawkins explained his motives for sculpting this Mesozoic wonderland, he did so in words that
55:20not only foreshadow Jurassic Park, but also echo the myth-making of our ancestors. His aim, he declared,
55:27it was, the revivifying of the ancient world, to call up from the abyss of time and from the depths of
55:34the earth, those vast forms and gigantic beasts which the almighty creator designed to inhabit and
55:40precede us in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain. No wonder then that he and
55:49Owen wanted to include this particular beauty. So what we have here is none other than Megalosaurus
55:58itself. Except that, as paleontologists have long appreciated, it actually looked nothing like this.
56:06Megalosaurus was not built like a people carrier. In point of fact, it was a theropod,
56:13a two-legged proto-tyrannosaur, which means that it looked like this. And that's why when I was a child
56:22I made a point of refusing every offer from my parents to take me to Crystal Palace. These reconstructions
56:29offended every bone in my dino-geek body. But now that I'm here,
56:38I can realise what a little prig I was being.
56:45This model, built of concrete, may not be cutting-edge paleontology,
56:50but it tells you everything about why dinosaurs still fascinate us.
56:55About the sense of awe and smallness we feel when we contemplate the immensity of geological time.
57:02And about how extraordinary it is, considering the millions upon millions of years that separate us
57:07from the Mesozoic that we know anything about dinosaurs at all. The achievements of paleontology,
57:13ever since the heroic pioneering days of Buckland and Owen, have certainly been astounding.
57:19And recent finds, especially in China, have opened up new worlds of wonder and fascination.
57:26But there is a sense, perhaps, in which we are not after all so wholly far removed from those who
57:34saw in fossils the remains of thunderbirds or griffins or dragons or giants. Our understanding of
57:42dinosaurs today is defined for us by the discoveries of scientists. And yet, the nature of the fossil record
57:52being what it is, those same scientists will never be able to fill in all the gaps.
57:59And so it is, into those same gaps, that we, just as our ancestors did, project all our manifold
58:06obsessions as variable and contradictory as human society itself.
58:10It turns out that the science fiction stories were right all along. Just when you think you've got
58:17dinosaurs pinned down, they always break free.
58:29Unearthing the worlds, we left behind more remarkable discoveries in The Secrets Below the Surface,
58:35a special collection of programmes on BBC iPlan.
Recommended
59:00
|
Up next
4:04
58:56
59:00
53:14
46:21
46:04
25:36
22:30
46:03
42:56
28:30
29:29
29:01
29:32
27:41
1:24:06
45:49
29:18
40:12
28:31
Be the first to comment