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Documentary, Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters
Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters is a 2011 British documentary film for BBC Four that explores the connection between ancient fossils and mythology. Presented by historian Tom Holland, the film investigates how people from different cultures, like Native Americans and ancient Greeks, may have used dinosaur and other prehistoric bones to create their myths and legends of creatures like the Thunderbird and Cyclops.
You can watch a clip from the documentary here:
#Dinosaurs #Monsters
Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters is a 2011 British documentary film for BBC Four that explores the connection between ancient fossils and mythology. Presented by historian Tom Holland, the film investigates how people from different cultures, like Native Americans and ancient Greeks, may have used dinosaur and other prehistoric bones to create their myths and legends of creatures like the Thunderbird and Cyclops.
You can watch a clip from the documentary here:
#Dinosaurs #Monsters
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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.
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