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Dinosaurs Myths And Monsters 2011
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00:09People have always thrilled to tales of monsters, but there's nothing in myth that can compare for
00:15sheer wonder with creatures from tyrannosaurs to woolly mammoths that once actually existed.
00:22Today, we know that life on this planet evolved over many millions of years, and we have some
00:27idea at least of how prehistoric creatures once actually looked, but such knowledge is
00:32comparatively recent.
00:36When people in the past came across the fossilised bones of large, vanished animals, it begged
00:41any number of questions.
00:43What sort of creatures could they possibly have come from?
00:46How old were these skeletal remains?
00:49Above all, perhaps, what did they mean?
00:53Just like us, ancient peoples were fascinated by the giant bones they found in the ground.
01:01Like us, they obsessed about their origins.
01:06In this programme, I'm going to explore the ways in which our ancestors sought to make
01:10sense of the remains of dinosaurs and other giant prehistoric creatures, and how they tried
01:15to reconcile such finds with their own understanding of life on Earth.
01:22That these explanations were wrong doesn't mean that they deserve our contempt.
01:27Just the opposite.
01:29Science begins in wonder and a yearning to fathom what may at first seem unfathomable.
01:34In that sense, at any rate, our ancestors did have something of the paleontologists about
01:38them.
01:39And in one fundamental respect, they were absolutely spot on.
01:45Monsters had indeed once trodden the Earth.
01:56I made this masterpiece when I was five, and looking at it now, I think, well, I was never
02:02going to cut it as a sculptor.
02:04But I do remember the intensity of yearning, a kind of love, really, that went into the making
02:12of 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.
02:27But if I shut my eyes, I could imagine there was a long-necked brachiosaur reaching higher
02:32than the trees.
02:34A horned and crested triceratops making the fields shake.
02:40And of course, if I was feeling particularly ghoulish, a blood-beslathered tyrannosaur.
02:50Why was the present day so dull?
02:53Why 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.
03:1235 years too late for my seven-year-old self, but visit a museum today, and the displays have
03:17never been more animatronic.
03:22Nor, 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.
03:45Now, the truth is, of course, that no human being has ever seen a living dinosaur.
03:52This is the Peabody Museum in New Haven, on the east coast of the United States.
03:59It contains this fabulous mural, painted in the 1940s.
04:04Dinosaurs first appear here, around 230 million years ago.
04:09And they last another 160 million years, right the way up to there, where no more dinosaurs.
04:17Of course, there are no humans anywhere in this mural.
04:21Homo sapiens didn't appear on earth for another 65 million years.
04:28But 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,
04:46our prehistoric ancestors were always being shown alongside dinosaurs.
04:50Total fantasy? Of course.
04:52But still, it made me wonder.
04:57When cavemen came across the bones of dinosaurs, what did they make of them?
05:01It's an abiding mystery.
05:03By 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 had been roaming
05:18the Great Plains, had long observed fossilised bones weathering out of the rocks, and invented
05:24stories to explain them.
05:28Adrian Mayer 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.
05:38Peoples who, by and large, were pre-literate, prehistoric.
05:44Their theories and their speculations and their myths, oral traditions, preserved in oral traditions over generations, over thousands of years,
05:53they were based
05:53on observation over time, they knew anatomy, they compared, they tried to imagine the creatures
06:02while alive, how they behaved, what they looked like, what kind of habitat.
06:05They actually had a sense of deep time, they had a sense of different ages on the earth, past
06:12ages, before the appearance of present-day humans.
06:16Each age characterised by different fauna and flora, different landforms.
06:22These 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
06:36obsession, these Stone Age myths were still being retold.
06:40And among those pricking up their ears were scientists such as Othniel Charles Marsh, the first director of the Peabody
06:49Museum.
06:51Marsh was one of the first great paleontologists and a genuine pioneer.
06:55He rode shotgun on the Great Plains, he hung out with Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and he was adopted
07:02as a blood brother by the Sioux.
07:11Many of the dinosaurs in the Peabody were dug up in the 1870s, a time when the West really was
07:19very wild.
07:22Among the collection are the first specimens ever found of iconic species, like Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus, the dinosaur formerly known
07:31as Brontosaurus.
07:37Marsh's expeditions took him to the Badlands.
07:40There, in his hunt for fossils, he was drawing on the very latest in scientific research.
07:46But some of his sources were altogether more prehistoric.
07:51The Sioux and other Native American peoples, too, told stories of mysterious beasts, supernatural creatures,
07:59whose bones might be found scattered across the ground.
08:04But what had prompted these legends?
08:08From the Sioux, Marsh learned the legend of thunder horses, creatures that galloped over storm clouds
08:14and 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,
08:31Marsh was able to employ a Sioux as his guide.
08:35He learned about some impressive bones found by the tribe.
08:38They said they were from strange creatures that had once lived in the land of the Sioux.
08:44Bones 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.
09:01This is the very specimen that was shown to Marsh,
09:04and in honour of the legends of the thunder horse told him by the Sioux,
09:09he named the creature a brontotherium, a thunder beast.
09:16Most intriguing of all, perhaps, were the tales told across the Great Plains,
09:22not of thunder horses, but of thunder birds,
09:25stories 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 thunder birds were their friends and advisers.
09:40They were great beasts, with wingspans as long as two war canoes.
09:49They had sharp-pointed beaks with sharp-pointed teeth,
09:54and 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,
10:05giant aquatic monsters.
10:08Now, at this same time, lived the water monsters.
10:14They 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.
10:27It'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.
10:38Nowadays, the Great Plains consist of weathered sediment,
10:42complete with the skeletons of long-necked marine reptiles called plesiosaurs,
10:46and pterosaurs, flying reptiles of the kind that were always carrying off Raquel Welch.
10:53And what do we find in Marsh's collection?
10:56A plesiosaur.
10:58And a pterosaur.
11:00A pteranodon.
11:01What all this suggests is an intriguing possibility.
11:07Almost all of the tribes had stories about water monsters and sky creatures,
11:13thunderbirds.
11:15And, of course, these are personified violent forces of nature.
11:19Thunder and lightning, very powerful forces of nature.
11:23And then flooding, which was supposedly caused by water monsters.
11:28And when they found very large bones, fossilized bones of extinct creatures,
11:35eroding and weathering out of river banks and lake shores,
11:39they 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
11:56for a fascination on the part of pre-literate societies
11:59with the bones of vanished creatures.
12:03Go back far enough in time,
12:05and you find it on the opposite side of the Atlantic as well, in Greece.
12:13First and greatest of the Greek poets was Homer,
12:16but the two poems he wrote down some 2,800 years ago,
12:21the Iliad and the Odyssey,
12:23almost certainly contained material far older than that.
12:28Perhaps then, even before the time of Homer himself,
12:32people were telling the story of one of the most celebrated monsters
12:36in all Greek mythology.
12:39The story? Well, it's a thriller.
12:41The hero Odysseus, in his wanderings across the wine-dark sea,
12:45finds himself trapped in a cave by a hideous monster.
12:48A monster that snacks on human flesh
12:51and has, in its forehead, just a single circular eye.
12:55It's a cyclops.
13:02What is the trapped Odysseus to do?
13:05Well, he gets the cyclops drunk.
13:07Then he and his men take a large spike.
13:11They aim it over the cyclops' single eye.
13:15In goes the spike.
13:17Splat! Goes the eye.
13:21Who could doubt the truth of such a story
13:24when 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.
13:37And this is the large nasal opening
13:39from which its trunk once extended.
13:44The Greeks didn't become familiar with real live elephants
13:47until the 4th century BC,
13:49long after the story of the cyclops first emerged.
13:55But we know from the fossil record
13:57that prehistoric species of elephant
14:00lived on Mediterranean islands long before humans were around.
14:06When ancient Greeks came across
14:08the preserved fossil skulls of these creatures,
14:11eroded from the rocks or perhaps dug up by a farmer,
14:14did 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
14:28of the island-dwelling giant cyclops?
14:31Now, no ancient source directly confirms the cyclops theory,
14:36but it seems eminently plausible nevertheless.
14:39Not only were there large bones to be found
14:42scattered across the entire sweep of the Mediterranean,
14:45but we know as well from other legends,
14:47from the writings of classical authors,
14:49that the Greeks did indeed take an interest
14:52in the fossil bones of giant beasts.
14:57On a few occasions, ancient writers wrote down
15:00what they thought of large bones.
15:02They are among the earliest surviving written records
15:05of 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
15:20when mounds are broken open.
15:38This is the site of what, back in classical times,
15:41was 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,
15:56a collection of giant bones.
15:59But where had they come from?
16:01Well, as everyone on Samos knew,
16:04their island had been the scene way back in ancient times
16:06of a quite spectacular battle,
16:09one that had been fought between an army of ferocious female warriors
16:13called Amazons and the god Dionysus.
16:16And what had Dionysus brought with him as backup?
16:20Nothing less than a war train of elephants.
16:32Panima, the ancients called the site of this battle.
16:35The blood-soaked field.
16:42And its location?
16:43Well, its location seems to have been here.
16:48The soil, which elsewhere on Samos is a dirty white,
16:52here you can see is the colour of dried blood.
16:57And on either side of it,
16:58hills that are absolutely stuffed with prehistoric elephant bones.
17:04So what that implies is that this site was witnessed
17:08to an absolutely key event in the history of paleontology.
17:13The ancients who came across the bones here
17:15and explained them as the remains of elephants
17:18were blazing a trail that would be followed
17:20by 18th century by 19th century paleontologists.
17:24For the very first time,
17:26the fossils of long-lost megafauna were being identified correctly.
17:31Nor was that the limit of ancient Greek paleontological achievement.
17:36Take the evidence on this Corinthian vase from the 6th century BC,
17:41now in a Boston museum.
17:43Here's a brave hero, Heracles,
17:46coming to the rescue of Hisione, a princess of Troy,
17:50who is being menaced by a monster.
17:53Most art historians and specialist-based paintings
17:56had identified this monster as a very poorly drawn sea monster
18:01peeking out of a cave.
18:03To me, it looked a lot like a fossil skull eroding out of a cliffside.
18:09You can see that it's disembodied, it has no body.
18:12So this monster looks the way it does,
18:14not 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,
18:25the humans and the other animals, they're all very well drawn.
18:30And so I think the artist was actually a good artist,
18:32and he's given us a very good rendering
18:35of what a fossil skull would look like as it weathers out of a cliff.
18:40I think the model might have been a samotherium,
18:44which is a giant giraffe species.
18:46They lived in the Miocene.
18:48They left a lot of fossils in the Aegean,
18:51on the islands in mainland Greece.
18:53That would be a very common fossil.
18:55Paleontologists noticed the large, empty eye socket,
18:59the broken-away nasal area,
19:02which is a very realistic rendition of a skull
19:05that's been in the ground for a long time,
19:07the jagged teeth, the back of the skull.
19:11It really matches what a samotherium skull looked like.
19:15This appears to be the oldest surviving artistic representation
19:19of a fossil in Greek art.
19:22So what we have here is an object
19:23that has absolutely key significance in the history of paleontology.
19:27I think it's a really powerful evidence
19:29that fossils did influence the way Greeks thought about their myths.
19:35For it to have been drawn so realistically,
19:38the 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
19:47of a second princess rescued from a monster.
19:51This is a book that used to belong to my grandmother,
19:54and 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
20:14that here was what seemed to be a dinosaur.
20:18In 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,
20:26the 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,
20:42and anyone who looks at the head is immediately turned to stone.
20:48And this, as you can see from the painting,
20:51is precisely the mistake that the monster has made.
20:55Andromeda was saved, and the monster?
20:57Well, the monster was turned to stone, just like a fossil.
21:03All of which raises an intriguing possibility.
21:07Was the whole story of the gorgon's head an attempt by the Greeks
21:12to explain what would otherwise have been inexplicable wonders?
21:15Colossal skeletons fashioned out of rock?
21:19Certainly, one thing is clear.
21:23Giant fossilised monsters, back in classical times as now,
21:27made for phenomenal box office.
21:31In 58 BC, when a flamboyant showman by the name of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus
21:37returned home after a spell throwing his weight around in Judea,
21:41he brought with him a giant fossil,
21:43which he claimed to have been the very monster turned to stone by Perseus.
21:49The monster, we are told, was over 40 feet long.
21:52The height of its ribs was greater than that of an Indian elephant,
21:55and its spine was one and a half feet thick.
21:59Now, we have no idea what it was that Scaurus had actually brought back with him,
22:04the fossil of some prehistoric beast, clearly a giant whale perhaps,
22:08or even, it may be, some composite monster,
22:12fashioned out of a whole assortment of fossilised remains.
22:18But of one thing we can be absolutely confident.
22:22It wasn't a dinosaur.
22:24All the giant bones found across the Mediterranean came from mammals.
22:28Elephants, rhinoceroses, samotheriums.
22:33We know this because the rocks that contain them are of relatively recent origin,
22:38say, eight million years old.
22:41To 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?
22:53Did the Greeks know anything about them?
22:56Adrian Meyer thinks they did.
22:58And for someone like me, whose childhood craze for dinosaurs evolved seamlessly
23:03into an obsession with the ancient Greeks,
23:06it's a completely gripping theory.
23:08The Greeks might have had knowledge of dinosaur remains
23:12if they travelled further east along the Silk Roots,
23:17where there are dinosaur remains,
23:19much farther east than the Mediterranean world.
23:22Beyond the land of the Scythians,
23:24the people who inhabited a vast stretch of Central Asia,
23:27there rose a steepling chain of mountains.
23:31So reports Herodotus,
23:33a Greek historian of the 5th century BC.
23:36And beyond these mountains,
23:38there exist mysterious creatures called griffins.
23:43Herodotus reported stories that he heard from the Scythian nomads.
23:48They 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.
24:03These creatures were fearsome.
24:07They preyed on horses and miners.
24:11Looking at the way Greeks represented griffins,
24:14as in this fine collection on Samos,
24:17you might think that these were fantastical creatures,
24:20the product of overheated imaginations.
24:23But that was not the understanding of the Greeks themselves.
24:27The early travellers may have been shown fossils of dinosaurs
24:31to support those stories of a beaked creature with forelegs and burrows,
24:38nests on the ground, near the gold, guarding the gold, actually.
24:43Now, in the Gobi Desert, east of the Altai Mountains,
24:47there stretches one of the richest hunting grounds
24:50for dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world.
24:55In 1922, when an American adventurer,
24:58a kind of proto-Indiana Jones named Roy Chapman Andrews,
25:02made the first paleontological survey of the region,
25:05he and his men were astounded by what they found.
25:09Fossils, he reported,
25:11were 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.
25:37It was a distant ancestor of one of the most celebrated dinosaurs
25:41ever found in the Wild West,
25:42the three-horned living tank Triceratops.
25:46And so, perhaps not surprisingly, it was named Protoceratops.
25:50And 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,
26:11griffins are a race of four-footed birds,
26:14almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.
26:19The Scythians described griffins as combining the features of birds and mammals.
26:24They were attempting to describe accurately the fossils that they saw,
26:30fossils of dinosaurs, things that they had never seen alive.
26:33And the fossils of the dinosaurs, Protoceratops dinosaurs,
26:36combine the features of mammalian, four-legged creature, predator,
26:41with the beak of a raptor or an eagle, a bird of some sort.
26:46If 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,
27:12recognised in Protoceratops not a reptile but a kind of bird,
27:16which prefigures what is pretty much the consensus of scientists today.
27:22The notion that birds are so closely related to dinosaurs
27:25that they are in fact a kind of dinosaur themselves
27:28is one that's been fundamentally shaped by recent discoveries in Asia.
27:32So how haunting it is to see in the fabulously ancient figure of the griffin
27:40a possible foreshadowing of insights
27:42that embody the absolute paleontological cutting edge.
27:48And just maybe, griffins weren't the only mythical creatures
27:52to have been inspired by the discovery of dinosaur bones.
27:57In China, the figure of the dragon
27:59was for millennia an emblem of the emperor,
28:03and it remains to this day
28:05a 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
28:21to 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
28:33are known as Qingdaosaurus,
28:37Yangtuanosaurus,
28:40or Sinosauropteryx.
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
28:53of fossils on the Chinese imagination came to light only a few years ago.
29:00In 2006, in central China,
29:04paleontologists discovered that the remains of dinosaurs
29:06were being dug up and sold as dragon bones.
29:09900 grams were going for the equivalent of 50p.
29:15Villagers told the paleontologists
29:17that they had been excavating the seam of fossils for a couple of decades.
29:22But the antiquity of Chinese medical practices
29:26suggests that the attribution of dinosaur bones to dragons
29:29may reach very much further back in time.
29:34Certainly, what we do know is that in China,
29:37dragons have been associated with health and good fortune for millennia.
29:44Ancient recipes employing the fossilised bones of large prehistoric mammals,
29:49and probably dinosaurs too,
29:50are included in the Chinese Materia Medica,
29:54a 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.
30:12In 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,
30:23first recorded in the third century BC.
30:25What you do is that you grind the bones to dust
30:29and you mix them with various herbal medicines.
30:36Then you eviscerate two swallows and you pack the bone, which is now fine dust,
30:42into small bags and place them inside the swallows and hang them overnight over a well.
30:49Once you've done that, they are magically efficacious.
30:53So let's put our bag inside and let it boil.
30:59So 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,
31:07into the surroundings.
31:09Chris Duffin, a historian of geology and folklore,
31:13made tea for me following the ancient recipe,
31:15but omitting the eviscerated swallow.
31:18He didn't recommend I drink it though.
31:20One of the herbal ingredients, not the powdered bone,
31:23turns 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,
31:41that long before scientists gave Tyrannosaurus his surname of Rex,
31:46the Latin word for king, royalty in dinosaurs,
31:49might have been paired up in ancient China.
31:55Nor was 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
32:12that might bring power, prestige, even victory in battle.
32:19The best example comes from a war that featured a Tyrannosaur
32:23among the cities of ancient Greece, Sparta.
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,
32:45out of which would bristle their spears,
32:47the equivalent of a Triceratops' horns.
32:49When they met with another city's phalanx,
32:53they would charge one another and shove and gouge and hack
33:00until one side turned and fled.
33:06But the Spartans were different.
33:09Unlike the warriors of other cities, they were full-time, professional.
33:15The very earth would shake to the rhythm of their metronomic approach.
33:19As they emerged through the dust of battle,
33:22they 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,
33:34had the training that enabled them to launch their wings in a flanking action.
33:37Their 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.
34:05Not that the Spartans always won.
34:07When, in the early 6th century BC,
34:10they 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,
34:23the Spartans rarely took defeat lying down.
34:27In the wake of this reverse, they sent a delegation to Tegea under cover of a truce.
34:32News had reached them of a strange find in a blacksmith's yard,
34:36the spine of a giant skeleton.
34:39Now, no wonder the Spartans were excited.
34:41They'd been told, you see, by an oracle that they would only ever conquer Tegea
34:45if they could first capture a skeleton.
34:48The bones of an ancient prince called Orestes.
34:53Orestes had the kind of dysfunctional family background
34:56that the ancient Greeks loved in their heroes.
34:58His mum had killed his dad.
35:01He'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,
35:13then what else could the skeleton in the blacksmith's yard be
35:16if 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.
35:29The bones were dug up, smuggled to Sparta, shown off, then reinterred.
35:36Shortly afterwards, the Tegeans submitted to the mastery of their hated neighbours.
35:41A resounding triumph for Sparta's military palaeontological complex.
35:51So, what was the skeleton?
35:53Almost certainly not the bones of Orestes.
35:57We can't be certain, but the remains most likely belonged to a mastodon,
36:01a 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.
36:11Why should the Spartans have presumed that the bones belonged to an ancient hero?
36:18The Greeks, when they contemplated the Earth's ancient past,
36:23conceived of it as an age of giants.
36:26Heroes in particular had been built on a colossal scale.
36:32Now, it is true that for all the restlessness of their curiosity
36:37and the sheer sweep of their metaphysical speculations,
36:40they had no real understanding of the vastness of time
36:44that had preceded the appearance of humans on Earth.
36:48What they did have, however, was a sense that humanity had evolved and changed over time,
36:53albeit not in a way that Darwin would have recognised.
36:57To classical thinkers, it was a fundamental presumption
36:59that everything was going to the dogs.
37:02What had once been a golden age was now an age of iron.
37:06The human race, originally a breed of heroes,
37:11had degenerated and diminished and ended up literally dwarvish.
37:19And what had served to give the Greeks this particular notion?
37:23Of course, in a sense, it's just human nature to presume that things were better in the good old days.
37:29But the Greeks weren't just drawing on a gut conservatism for their understanding of the distant past.
37:35They had evidence for it, such as the outsized bones dug up at Tegaea by the Spartans.
37:43The people of Samos may have identified the elephant bones on their island correctly,
37:47but most Greeks, confronted by a giant fossil,
37:51would like as not believe it to be the remains of some legendary giant hero.
37:57Indeed, so widespread was this presumption that the relics of renowned big hitters such as Theseus or Ajax
38:06became must-have accessories for any temple keen to make its mark.
38:12Here is one of those venerated giant bones,
38:16now recognised to be part of the femur of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.
38:20It was dug up in a temple at Nicarea, near Sparta.
38:24This is one of only two fossilized bones of this sort
38:31that are known from Greek sanctuaries.
38:34So this is a really rare and precious object.
38:37It is indeed. It's a very rare discovery.
38:41They would have seen it as a relic, almost certainly of a lost hero,
38:46very much like the way that we see relics of saints displayed in relicaries in churches today.
38:58So it was that fossil bones ended up as tourist attractions across first the Greek
39:04and then the Roman world.
39:06Even Caesars might come to gawp.
39:10The Emperor Hadrian, we're told, when a skeleton with kneecaps the size of a discus was exposed on a beach,
39:17embraced and kissed the bones and laid them out.
39:21No wonder then, confronted by such seemingly incontrovertible evidence for the colossal statue of ancient men,
39:29that 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.
39:51The man who spoke these words was Augustine,
39:54a 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 discovery of an elephant
40:09tooth.
40:10Not, however, that Augustine thought that it was an elephant tooth.
40:15In size, as he pointed out, it was as big as a hundred human teeth combined.
40:20No wonder then, that he should have stated confidently,
40:22I 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.
40:38He had one foot in the waning world of classical culture, but he was also a Christian, a bishop, a
40:46saint.
40:47He knew and loved his Virgil, but he lived to see Rome sacked.
40:50In attempting to explain the mysterious giant's tooth, he looked backwards to the traditions of the Greeks and the Romans.
40:58But he looked forwards as well, to those of the Middle Ages.
41:03As 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.
41:18Of course, the scholars of the Middle Ages, like the philosophers and biologists of ancient Greece,
41:25had no real idea just how ancient life on Earth really was.
41:29But they weren't wholly lacking a notion of a vanished age that had belonged to beings larger and more exotic
41:36than themselves.
41:38These creatures, like the heroes of ancient Greece, were human.
41:42Colossally human.
41:45Giants.
41:49But where had these giants gone?
41:52The answer to that, so people in the Middle Ages believed, was to be found in the greatest cataclysm ever
41:58to afflict humanity.
42:00Noah 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, people 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.
42:32In 1342, for instance, a cave was discovered in southern Italy that contained the skeleton of a man 400 feet
42:39tall.
42:40Or so we are told by the great medieval writer Boccaccio.
42:43To display their discovery to posterity, the citizens of Trapani strung the bones on a wire and carried them to
42:52a church.
42:56Not 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?
43:09We now know that these bird-like tracks, discovered in Oxfordshire, were left by the ancestors of carnivorous dinosaurs like
43:16Tyrannosaurus.
43:17But it's no wonder that back in the Middle Ages, when similar prints were discovered in locations ranging from Poland
43:24to the Alps,
43:25that some rather diabolical explanations should have been provided.
43:32Whence comest thou? God asks Satan in the Bible.
43:36Back 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 the Middle Ages.
44:06As in the East, so in the West, people told tales of dragons.
44:12Those of Europe, however, unlike those of China, were malign.
44:17Worthy trophies for a passing hero.
44:21Indeed, dinosaur footprints have been found beside the Rhine in the very spot traditionally associated with Fafnir,
44:28the 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.
44:45In 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,
45:04a nearby swamp was the haunt of a monstrous serpent,
45:08until a bold knight, as bold knights tended to do back in those days,
45:12decided to take the dragon on.
45:15So what the knight did was he got hold of a cow,
45:18he stuffed it full of quicklime, and then he used the cow as bait.
45:22The dragon came roaring down, devoured the cow,
45:26the quicklime ignited, the dragon exploded, and bang!
45:31Klagenfurt had been made safe for civilisation.
45:35Two and a half centuries on from the discovery of the mysterious skull,
45:39and the legend had only improved in the telling.
45:42So much so, that in 1590, the good folk of Klagenfurt
45:46were inspired to commission this.
45:50Once again, a fossilised bone inspired a fabulous creation,
45:54this time in three dimensions,
45:56which I suppose begs an obvious question.
46:00To what creature had the skull dug up in 1335 actually belonged?
46:05The answer? Not a dragon, but a woolly rhinoceros.
46:10And this forlorn spot north of the town was where it had breathed its last.
46:17There's a sense, then, in which the sculpture,
46:20fashioned within the lifetimes of Galileo and Francis Bacon,
46:24might seem a last spasm of medieval superstition.
46:28But that, I think, would be unfair.
46:30Yes, 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.
46:45This, after all, is not a monster conjured up purely from the imagination.
46:53It constitutes, however inadequately, the oldest surviving reconstruction of a prehistoric beast.
47:06A century on, and to scholars touched by the dawning rays of the Enlightenment,
47:12talk of dragons or giants was becoming an embarrassment.
47:17In 1683, when the world's original university museum, the Ashmolean,
47:22first opened its doors in this Oxford building,
47:26a mysterious bone dug up near the village of Cornwell was one of its prize exhibits.
47:33In his book, The Natural History of Oxfordshire,
47:36Robert Plott, the first keeper of the Ashmolean,
47:40tried to work out what the bone had come from.
47:43First, 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,
47:51in 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
48:04and measuring it and actually comparing it to the bone that he had in hand.
48:08He determines that they're different, they're different in shape and size,
48:10and he eliminates that as an option.
48:12He very quickly also eliminates horse and ox as viable candidates,
48:17and he concludes in the end, basically, with the only other conclusion that he could draw,
48:22was that it was the bone of a giant.
48:24This is the illustration in Plott's book of the mysterious relic.
48:28The original has vanished.
48:31In 1763, when a scholar named Richard Brooks inspected it
48:34and gave it, in the most up-to-date scientific style, an imposing classical name,
48:39he called it, what else, scrotum humanum.
48:44Now, reflected in this name was the fact that Brooks,
48:47although he knew he wasn't really dealing with a pair of unfeasibly large testicles,
48:52still had no idea what kind of creature his scrotum humanum had actually been.
48:58Like the ancient Greeks, like the Christians of the Middle Ages,
49:02Brooks and his contemporaries had not the faintest notion
49:06just how fabulously ancient the planet truly was.
49:10But all that was about to change,
49:13and fossilised bones, no longer embarrassments,
49:17would be enshrined as prize exhibits in a scientific revolution.
49:23In 1788, a Scottish geologist named James Hutton published an almost literally epical book
49:29in which he proposed that the Earth was infinitely more ancient than humanity.
49:34Indeed, Hutton could find no evidence for there having been a creation at all.
49:39The 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.
49:57Here.
49:59I can feel my situm humanum.
50:01I can feel my situm humanum.
50:07Between 1815 and the early 1820s,
50:10a whole series of fossils were uncovered by men quarrying for slate
50:13down mineshafts like this, at Stonesfield, north of Oxford.
50:23So this narrow, cramped passageway is where slate was mined for the roofs of Oxford Colleges
50:32and Cotswold Cottages.
50:33And it's where, in the course of that mining,
50:37the teeth, the bones of a mysterious and monstrous beast were found.
50:42And the significance of these finds is precisely that they were made down here underground,
50:50because it meant that the origins of these bones
50:55could be very precisely identified to a particular layer in the sequence of rocks.
51:04Whatever the creature was that these fossils had come from,
51:08one thing was absolutely clear.
51:11It was old.
51:12It was very, very old.
51:16The bones belonged to the same mysterious creature
51:19that Richard Brooks had named Scrotum Humanum.
51:23But now there was to be no talk of giants' testicles.
51:27This was because the fragments ended up in the hands of the man
51:31perhaps best qualified in the whole of Britain to identify them,
51:35a clergyman named William Buckland,
51:38who also just happened to be Oxford's Professor of Geology.
51:43What Buckland deduced was that the fossilised bones
51:46had belonged to a very carnivorous and very large lizard,
51:51a Megalosaurus.
51:54By 1822, the name had appeared for the first time in print.
51:58The animal, identified by Buckland,
52:02must in some instances have attained a length of 40 feet
52:05and stood eight feet high.
52:08The notion that such a monster might once have wandered over Oxfordshire
52:12was, of course, a thrilling one.
52:18With the remains of other, similar giant lizards
52:21simultaneously being found elsewhere across southern England,
52:24it opened up, to the eyes of the public, a quite staggering prospect.
52:30Once, it seemed, in the chillingly unfathomable reaches
52:35of a pre-human past, there had existed an entire world of savage reptiles,
52:40red in tooth and claw.
52:44Time, cruel time,
52:46come and subdue that brow.
52:50Quite how the existence, millions upon millions of years ago,
52:55of ravening Megalosaurs was to be squared with the Biblical chronology
52:59that had man being fashioned by a loving God on the sixth day of creation,
53:04was, for theologians, a most unexpected and alarming poser.
53:10Buckland was merely the first of many clergymen to wrestle with the implications.
53:16Certainly, the discovery of so many fossils
53:20opened a vista of monsters to the wide eyes of the Victorian public
53:23that compared with anything in the Bible or Greek mythology.
53:30Dragons of the prime, as the great poet Tennyson put it,
53:34that 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,
53:47Richard Owen.
53:49When he wasn't busy founding the Natural History Museum in London
53:52and being quite sensationally rude to all his colleagues,
53:55Owen had a day job as Britain's leading anatomist.
54:00Megalosaurus, and creatures like it, he announced,
54:04had ranked not merely as lizards, but as terrible lizards.
54:07In Greek, dinosaurs.
54:11The name reflected the two sides of Owen's complex personality.
54:16The brilliant anatomist,
54:17who had correctly extrapolated from a few scattered bones
54:21an entire kingdom of vanished creatures,
54:23and the devout Anglican,
54:26awestruck before the revelation
54:28of just how stupefying God's creations had always been.
54:34Nor was Owen alone in his wonder.
54:37Within a decade of his first use of the word,
54:40dinosaurs had become a veritable craze.
54:43In 1854, Owen himself,
54:46and an associate,
54:48the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins,
54:50blazed what would prove a popular trail.
54:53They opened a dinosaur theme park.
54:55And here it still stands,
54:58Crystal Palace in South London.
55:14When Hawkins explained his motives
55:16for sculpting this Mesozoic wonderland,
55:19he did so in words that not only foreshadow Jurassic Park,
55:23but also echo the myth-making of our ancestors.
55:26His aim, he declared, was,
55:29the revivifying of the ancient world,
55:31to call up from the abyss of time
55:33and from the depths of the earth,
55:35those vast forms and gigantic beasts
55:37which the almighty creator designed to inhabit and precede us
55:41in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain.
55:47No wonder then,
55:49that he and Owen wanted to include this particular beauty.
55:54So what we have here is none other than Megalosaurus itself,
56:00except that, as paleontologists have long appreciated,
56:04it actually looked nothing like this.
56:07Megalosaurus was not built like a people carrier.
56:10In point of fact, it was a theropod,
56:13a two-legged proto-tyrannosaur,
56:16which means that it looked like this.
56:20And that's why, when I was a child,
56:22I made a point of refusing every offer from my parents
56:25to take me to Crystal Palace.
56:28These reconstructions offended every bone in my dino-geek body.
56:36But, now that I'm here, I 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,
57:04considering the millions upon millions of years that separate us from the Mesozoic,
57:08that we know anything about dinosaurs at all.
57:11The achievements of paleontology,
57:14ever since the heroic pioneering days of Buckland and Owen,
57:17have certainly been astounding.
57:19And recent finds, especially in China,
57:23have opened up new worlds of wonder and fascination.
57:27But there is a sense, perhaps, in which we are not, after all,
57:32so wholly far removed from those who saw in fossils
57:35the remains of thunderbirds, or griffins, or dragons, or giants.
57:41Our understanding of dinosaurs today
57:44is defined for us by the discoveries of scientists.
57:49And yet, the nature of the fossil record being what it is,
57:53those same scientists will never be able to fill in all the gaps.
57:59And so it is, into those same gaps,
58:02that we, just as our ancestors did,
58:05project all our manifold obsessions,
58:07as variable and contradictory as human society itself.
58:12It turns out that the science fiction stories were right all along.
58:16Just when you think you've got dinosaurs pinned down,
58:19they always break free.
58:25So I'll see you next time.
58:52I like how muchaste our films,
58:53where it is once we filter in.
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