What happens when mythological creatures are proven to have existed?

A couple of weeks ago I started a thread to ask “Are there any novels set in the 1800s about paleontology/reactions to the discovery of dinosaurs?” and I’m still thinking about what that might have been like to those living at the time. I mean, we take for granted that dinosaurs really existed, but once upon a time that must’ve been really big news.

I think the closest we could come to that experience is if creatures out of mythology are someday proven to exist too. So pack your bags and let’s go on a flight of fancy for this thread…but not too fancy, how would it really be, do you suppose?

Anyway, later this year an archeology dig site in a remote corner of China digs up a complete skeleton. This skeleton is 50 feet long, very slender and snake-like in appearance yet does have four spindly limbs, and the skull has both horns and some inner structures that haven’t been seen before. Before long it’s hypnotized that these structures allowed the creature to breath fire.

It hits the news: it’s a dragon.

While this is still being debated over the course of the next two years, there are three other big finds:

[ul]
[li]In Utah a dig site unearths the skeleton of an unknown bipedal humanoid. The skeleton stands an impressive 17 feet tall.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]In Scotland another dig site produces a skeleton that is very zebra or horse-like in build, but has a single horn in the center of its forehead.[/li][/ul]

[ul]
[li]And lastly in Greece a dig site finds a deformed horse skeleton. Or a deformed man’s skeleton. Either way it looks for all the world like the fusion of a man and a horse.[/li][/ul]

Scientists clamor to be part of debunking the finds (and a few want to be part of proving the hypotheses about them instead), but by the end of 2021, it’s been conclusively proven by DNA analysis and morphology etc. that all four of these skeletons are 100% real, and not one of them is conclusively proven to merely be a deformed member of an extant species.

So, as 2022 dawns, people are faced with the new knowledge that dragons, giants, centaurs, and unicorns are (or, rather, were) real. How do people react?

One of the best post/username combos ever!

Expect reams of new scholarly papers from newly minted “experts” reexamining old stories, fairy tales, and superstitions in light of the possibility that they’re couched in reality.

And new classes and degree offerings from prominent universities.

Oh, and don’t forget the GoFundMe’s started to clone live specimens from the recovered DNA.

Despite being the biggest story of the year a lot of people won’t even know it happened. Some percentage of people will be surprised to find out these creatures weren’t considered to exist in the first place. Some will be pointing out that they knew it all along and nobody believed them. The fundamentalist crowd will say it disproves evolution. A large portion of the population will find it to be incredible, but otherwise don’t care because it’s just another one of those science-y things they don’t understand. A large portion of knowledgeable people won’t accept that the evidence is valid and insist it’s some kind of hoax (count me in for that group, the more people are sure of something the less I am). There will be endless PBS, Discovery Channel, et al, specials about the finds, plenty of animations of what these creatures must have looked like when they were alive, and a lot of half-assed explanations of what has been scientifically established. Then speculation on how the DNA can be used to revive these species, and plenty of additional searches for live examples. Most people in all these groups will forget about it as soon as a new iPhone is released.

I’d buy a Boston Whaler and lurk around dangerous shoals. And renew correspondence with Santa Claus.

I live in the area where the ‘Bigfoot, The legend of Boggy Creek’ was filmed. There are many people here who believe it exists. I would say 1000s, but there’s not that many people around here. So you wouldn’t surprise them if you found a corpse or a live one. Me? I would be running and screaming.

I don’t think a unicorn would be earth shattering. A horse with a horn? Yeah, I could believe that that happened.

The other three would be a lot more surprising. I guess it would be shocking at first, but pretty soon everyone would just accept it and get on with their lives. Sort of like they did with the dinosaurs (though obviously they were different in the sense that they didn’t exactly match mythical creatures, though they were similar - aren’t there theories that a lot of mythical creatures were based on ancient people finding dinosaur bones and letting their imaginations run wild?).

I’d be more surprised by the discovery of certain mythical creatures than the discovery of intelligent life outside of earth, that much is certain.

I think it would be much the same as with homo florensis \ ‘hobbits’: furious academic debate of which the rest of the populace remains largely ignorant. I’m not even sure if they’re right now considered to be a separate species or just a known strain of homo suffering from one condition or the other that stunts their growth…

Although unicorns, dragons or giants probably do have a larger wow-factor than hobbits / dwarves.

IANA Biologist, but I think the centaur in particular would be extraordinarily hard to explain in terms of our current understanding of evolution, the natural history of life on Earth, and the developmental and historical constraints on what sorts of things can evolve through natural selection. The creationists might actually have a point on that one.

Firstly, how do you “fuse” a primate and an ungulate (perissodactyl)? Humans and horses diverged as long as a hundred million years ago. Evolution just doesn’t work like that. All of those “half-this, half-the-other” creatures of mythology (centaurs, griffins, and so forth) seem completely impossible to reconcile with what we know of the history of life on Earth.

But suppose the centaur isn’t really “half-human, half-horse”. Maybe its ancestors were either primates, or ungulates, or something else, and the resulting superficial similarities to horses, humans, or both horses and humans, were only the result of convergent evolution, like dolphins and ichthyosaurs or various marsupials with various placental mammals. Centaurs still have the same issue as Pegasus: How do you get a critter with six functional limbs from a tetrapod vertebrate? The four-limbed body-plan is a really, really fundamental constraint; it has been modified–greatly modified even (pterosaurs, birds, and bats; or whales; or snakes), but in those cases, we can easily enough imagine what the “missing links” would look like between your basic quadrupedal vertebrate and the resulting birds, bats, whales, or snakes. Not so much with a six-limbed vertebrate like a centaur. And every single “missing link” between whatever the hell the ancestors of the centaurs were and fully-formed centaurs had to have been a viable life-form, capable of surviving long enough to reproduce.

Hard not to see that one as evidence of God, or the gods, or Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, or time-travelers from some future century with really advanced knowledge of genetic engineering and a rather juvenile sense of humor.

No, I see that as a massively different event. Dinosaurs were a new discovery; like the discovery of America. We had no idea about them until they were discovered. We discover unknown things all the time.

Things like dragons and unicorns and fairies are well-known - but in the realm of fiction. To have something come out of the realm of fiction and enter the real world would shake everything we know about how reality works. It would suggest that people somehow have developed the ability to summon things into existence by our collective belief.

Presumably one explanation for the existence of hitherto-mythical creatures (at least the ones that actually could more-or-less plausibly have existed) would be, not that humans somehow summoned them into existence through our collective belief, but rather that our “myths” about unicorns actually weren’t garbled traveler’s tales of rhinoceroses or misinterpreted artistic renditions of aurochs done in profile, but were actually stories passed down through the ages from a time when humans really did interact with some kind of single-horned equid.

Now that’s just mean.

Or it could mean that the stories were true all along, but that the supposedly-objective scientists were too biased to even investigate them.

The OP mentions DNA analysis, which assumes there are good DNA samples to be found. Will that show that these things have a known relationship to existing life? Or totally disconnected? When do the remains date from?
Are they physically possible? MEBuckner covered that issue.

Since these guys don’t show up in the Bible, if they proved some god it ain’t the current western one. I’d go with creatures designed by advanced aliens as the most likely explanation not violating any known physical laws.

Okay, I realize I shouldn’t be arguing against the premise. But my suspension of belief just doesn’t stretch that far. If you want to argue that fifty million year old fossils of an unknown species are discovered, I can accept that. But species like dragons or unicorns that existed within the last few thousand years? There’s no way we would just now be discovering them.

Totally a hoax. Chinese dragons don’t do the fire thing. And unicorns are actually a thing. Granted, a meddled-with thing, but nonetheless a thing you could find an unexplained skeleton of that could be as old as domesticated goats.

The same thing that happened to the duck billed platypus. That used to be a cryptozoological rumor, until they started finding them and studying them.

However the creatures OP describes are genuinely mythical creatures. I’m not sure how people would react in that situation.

I’m sorry, but that notion is more unbelievable than unicorns or dragons.

If creatures are breathing fire in the past, growing to 17’ tall, and becoming human horse hybrids. I’m going to convert to wicanism and start trying to learn magic and spells because obviously all of the old tales of magic had some basis in fact and I’d want to be on the front end of that curve.

The first platypus specimen that English scientists saw was assumed to be a hoax. The supposedly-objective scientists “knew” that such a thing could not exist, and so they didn’t even bother to investigate at first.

There are plenty of such stories. The fact that you evidently don’t know about any of them shows that you are heavily biased towards the myth that scientists are inherently objective.