Also whale penises, apparently.
Not the entirety of the legend, but they have found Jackalopes, or at least rabbits/Hares with papilloma virus caused growths that look a hell of a lot like horns or antlers.
Got a cite or any pictures on that one, wolfman? I’d like to see them.
Many examples here. Also can do weird things with humans.
It has been speculated that the Native American tradition of the Thunderbird may have been based on the gigantic extinct Teratornis, which may have still been extant when humans colonized North America.
Tabby patterned cheetahs were thought to be a tall tale until one was spotted strolling around the Kruger National Park.
Whatever about mythological creatures turning out to be real, we also have cases of real creatures being assumed to be mythological. It’s commonly assumed or asserted even today that references in the Hebrew scriptures to leviathans, cockatrices, behemoths, giants and unicorns are references to mythological creatures, but in fact it’s likely that they refer to real creatures.
Giant squid aka the Kraken are the closest thing to a actual *mythological *creature that was found to be real. The Rhinoceros was semi-mythical, Pliny the Elder and perhaps the OT wrote about them, but they were dismissed as mythical.
But yeah, quite a few odd creatures have shown up.
Hobbits are backwards, we had them in literature, then they named small humanoids after them, but it was a very interesting find.
It seems they were* perhaps *extant at the same time: wiki
Teratornis woodburnensis.[5] The first species to be found north of the La Brea Tar Pits, this partial specimen was discovered at Legion Park, Woodburn, Oregon in 1999. It is known from a humerus, parts of the cranium, beak, sternum, and vertebrae which indicate an estimated wingspan of over 4 meters (14 ft).[6] The find dates to the late Pleistocene, about 12,000 years ago, in a stratum containing the remains of megafauna such as mammoth, mastodon, and ground sloths, as well as evidence of early human occupancy at the site.[5]
And now Humans are dated back to 13000 years ago, with the Teratorns becoming extinct maybe only 10000 years ago, there *seems *to have been a overlap. No solid proof however, but I like your guess.
Only on the boys though
One of the more interesting books I’ve read is T. H. White’s The Bestiary. It’s a translation and commentary on a medieval bestiary by the author of the sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, and The Book of Merlin, who had a knowledge and reverence for things medieval.
as he points out, the Bestiary was not supposed to be a book of fantastic and mythological animals, but an actual attempt to present a listing of animals, including unfamiliar ones from far away. It wasn’t the author’s fault that he was copying things at umpteenth hand, or that the illustrator had never seen an Ostrich before (and so drew an eagle with camel feet, as described in the text) or hadn’t seen a crocodile before, and simply gave his best guess.
In any event, many of the beasts, on c,lose examination, appear as if they might be real creatures, although the description might seem far removed by the time the Bestiarist wrote them down.
Thus the basilisk, the King of Reptiles (as the name indicates), which kills with the ryes, might actually be the King Cobra (which we still call a “King”), which can spit venom in your eye, leading to death.
White makes a good argument for the Amphisbaena, a retile with a head at each end, being a real creature, if somewhat mis-described.
and the case of the Unicorn is interesting. Most descriptions can be traced back to Ctesias’ ancient greek description of a one-horned Indian beast that is certainly the Indian rhinoceros. It should be observed that the Bestiary also describes another one-horned creature, also depicted with a single horn, the Monoceros. And there are extra wrinlkles to the Unicorn story, as well. You have to read Odell Shepard’s the Lore of the Unicorn and Willy ley’s the Unicorn, the Lungfish, and the Dodo to get the full story.
Draco, the Dragon, it should be pointed out, is basically a big snake, of which there are plenty in the world. A full history of the Dragon in world history has yet to be written, but there are a LOT of roots to its story, as well, including Hebrew sources, Banylonian ones, the entire Chinese tradition, and the “Jenny Haniver”
The notion of sudden and catastrophic changes to the planet was dismissed as rubbish by early geologists. Change over time was the holy mantra for a long time. So in the 1920s, when J. Harlen Bretz hypothesized that the landscape in eastern Washington/Oregon was caused by sudden and catastrophic floods, he was considered a crackpot and discredited by his peers.
As it turns out, of course, he was absolutely right about Glacial Lake Missoula and the geologic carving that its floods caused.
Hopefully fermented ones, rather than ergotic ones.
building on chefguy’s post… with the discovery and dating of Gobekli Tepi, the existence of a technologically advanced, astronomically literate society has been confirmed as of 12,000 years before present.
Robert Schoch and John Anthony West on re-dating Egypt in general, and the Sphinx in specific.
Randall Carlson on astronomical catastrophes. Carlson relies on Bretz for the basis of his work.
The importance of the Chicxulub crater was laughed at until modern geologists proved it is the cause of the K-T extinction event.
In general, the idea that cosmic events are responsible for global scale catastrophes has been brushed away by consensus science for 100 years, but little by little, that resistance is being broken.
Sea “serpents” are thought to have been inspired by sightings of oarfish.
Most of these are really really fringe theories, to put it mildly. To say that they’ve been “proven real” is just … false.
The Chicxulub crater was not “laughed at” – it was unknown to almost everyone except the Pemex geologists who found it and were forbidden by their employer to publish the data. Almost as soon as the crater’s existence became widely known, its importance was recognized by geologists.
I don’t believe for an instant that an oral tradition could be passed on in any recognizable form for 10 000 + years.
There’s no need for an actual giant bird to have existed for a story about one to appear. This possibility is so likely that the vast number of completely made up stories about huge birds would drown any story “based on actual events” that could have survived for thousands of years.
And if it was somehow demonstrated (say, by a time travelling folklorist) that a tale/myth currently being told is descended directly from an original story about an actual giant bird, it would have undergone so many changes over such a long time that it would be as likely now to talk about a red clad girl bringing butter to her grandmother than still about a giant bird, long ago replaced in the story by a more familiar wolf.
The tendency to try to find a real world basis lost in a remote past for myths and tales is completely misguided in my opinion.
Yeah, not so much. Shoch based his argument on dating the sphynx by assuming that it was subject to water erosion, and that couldn’t have happened unless it was very old. Unfortunately for him, the weathering of the Sphynx can also be explained through salt exfoliation, which doesn’t require it to be older.
At least Shoch is a real scientist. His work was then used by cranks like Graham Hancock to date the sphynx and the great pyramid to 12,500 years ago, because that’s the number he needed to make his ‘Orion’ theory work. It’s all motivated reasoning and garbage science.
If you want to think scientifically, you have to judge Shoch’s evidence/supposition against pretty much everything we know about ancient prehistory. The vast weight of evidence is on that side, and Shoch’s work is a serious outlier that has conventional explanations for the problem he was trying to solve.
From Carlson’s web site:
Stellar credentials for a scientist. He also describes himself as a ‘geomancer’ and a student of ‘sacred geometry’, whatever that is. He seems to heavily quote Graham Hancock and other nuts. Hard pass on anything he has to say.
I call this the ‘Star Trek technique’ for giving crackpot theory the imprimatur of reasonableness and normalcy by associating it with other reasonable things.
On Star Trek it went like this: “Consider the great philosophers in history: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Blebur of Tharsus IV.”
In your arena, it’s, “The world is shaped by cataclysmic events, such as the Chicxulub crater, the eruption of Vesuvius, and the great comet that destroyed all traces of ancient civilizations.”
I have heard Egyptologist agree that perhaps the Sphinx we know was based upon a earlier work, since apparently the stone kinda sorta looked like a lion or something before being carved on, and added to. There are quite a few dissenting hypotheses about the age of the Great Sphinx.
It could well be an earlier work, but real scientists taking that point of view are using ‘earlier’ to mean anywhere from 20 years to maybe a few hundred years earlier. The nuts like Hancock are claiming that the Sphinx is eight thousand years older, which would put it in the Mesolithic era. The known cultures of the time were stone-aged hunter gatherers or sedentary fisherman types, and we’ve never found anything suggesting they were capable of building something like the Sphynx. or any indication that they were builders of megastructures. The Sphinx is already the oldest known megastructure in Egypt.