Steve Connor digs up the facts – and the fiction
12 February 2007, The Independent
Ancient bones and other fossilised remains have been known to humans for millennia but it is only over the past 300 years or so that their true origins have been revealed. Until then, a rich folklore sought to explain these enigmatic relics from the past. Every culture in every country, it seems, wanted an explanation for the unusual objects and bizarre shapes that often seemed to emerge, as if by magic, from the ground.
Imagine a group of prehistoric hunters, whose trail has brought them to a remote cave in northern Europe. They discover a cave and in it they find the empty skull of a huge, unrecognisable beast sitting on top of a pile of bones. It is easy to how the myth of cave-dwelling dragons who fed on other large creatures might have come about.
In fact, the mysterious beast would have been a woolly rhinoceros, which roamed Ice Age Europe before it went extinct about 10,000 years ago. Like many animals before it, the rhino would have used caves to take refuge from the elements – unaware that its bones would become entombed for thousands of years.
In Japan, fossilised sharks’ teeth were said to be the pointed thumbnails of Tengu Man, a mythical mountain goblin. In India, the fossilised shell of ammonites – marine molluscs – were known as saligrams, symbols of the god Vishnu, which were kept in temples to purify water. In China, the fossils of mollusc-like brachiopods were known as Shih-yen, or stone swallows, which were said to be able to fly during thunderstorms.
Some fossils were ground into powder and taken as a potion to cure a rich variety of ailments. Others, like the saligrams of Hindus and the “tonguestones” of Christians, were dipped into drink to ward off evil.
Fossils were given exotic names in the many attempts to try to explain their existence. “Names such as thunderbolts, tonguestones, toadstones, snakestones and devil’s toenails became widely used for different types of fossils in Britain,” says Paul Taylor, a fossils expert at the Natural History Museum in London. Many resembled parts of the human body, and so became associated with the practice of sympathetic medicine – curing like with like. In Chinese medicine, the “dragon’s teeth” used in some recipes were in fact the teeth and bones of common animals.
It was not until the mid-18th century that the true nature of fossils began to emerge. A physician called Steno, who lived and worked in Florence, realised that the peculiar stone tongues that fell out of rocks were actually the teeth of ancient sharks. He was able to prove his theory after dissecting the head of a huge shark caught near Livorno in 1666. His “eureka” moment was the beginning of the end for fossil folklore – and the rest, as they say, is palaeontology.
An exhibition, Fossil Folklore, opens today at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire, and runs until 8 July.
Protoceratops and the griffin
Protoceratops, which means “first horned face”, was a sheep-sized herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago), that lived in what is now Mongolia. Protoceratops had a large neck-frill but, unlike later ceratopsians, lacked well-developed horns.
Fossilised skulls of this dinosaur with a bird-like beak have been unearthed in the Gobi desert, which is where the myth of the gold-guarding griffin originates – a ferocious beast with the body of a lion, the head and wings of an eagle and talons as big as bull-horns.
The griffin myth probably originated from the tales of Scythian gold miners who may have come across Protoceratops skulls on the edge of the Altai mountains, in what is now Siberia. The uncanny resemblance between these two creatures suggests that the fossilised skull and bones of the real dinosaur may have been the inspiration for the vivid descriptions of the mythological beast.
Pyramids, slave’s lentils and angel’s money
Nummulites are disc- or lenticle-shaped fossils with a complex system of internal chambers arranged in a coil. Despite the fact that they can reach 6cm in diameter, nummulites are the skeletons of single-celled organisms (Foraminifera) that resembled the amoeba. They lived on the sea-bed mostly during the Eocene and Oligocene periods (about 50 to 25 million years ago).
The Egyptian pyramids of Giza are built of limestone packed with nummulites. Strabo the Geographer in the first-century BC was told that the lentil-shaped fossils were remnants of the food of the slaves who built the pyramids. Other nummulites have flat shells resembling coins in shape and size; in folklore, they have been dubbed “angel’s money”.
Echinoids and jewstones
Balanocidaris is a sea urchin from the late Jurassic period (about 160 to 145 million years ago). The delicate bodies of these animals, distantly related to the starfish, often disintegrated after death. However, club-like spines attached to the bodies of the living were more robust, and survived to become fossilised.
Crusaders collected Balanocidaris fossils, which they called “jewstones”, from the Holy Lands and wore them as lucky amulets. The fossils have also been traced back to Ancient Egyptian communities from around 650BC. Sometimes apothecaries would grind the bladder-like stones into a powder, to be used as a cure for various urinary-tract problems.
Insects in amber and the DNA myth
When resin oozed from ancient trees, it sometimes trapped insects and other small animals and plants. When it fossilised, the organism was often perfectly preserved.
We can blame Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, for the myth that it is possible to extract dinosaur DNA from the last blood-meal of a prehistoric mosquito trapped in amber, and use it to reconstruct a dinosaur’s genome and from that the animal itself.
In fact, any DNA that survived in amber would be so fragmented that it would be impossible to recreate living dinosaurs from it. That didn’t stop Steven Spielberg from cashing in on the idea when he made the hugely successful 1993 film of Crichton’s book.
Fish teeth and toadstones
Lepidotes is an extinct genus of ray-finned fish that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Their bodies were covered with thick scales and they had batteries of hard, round teeth to crush the shells of their molluscan prey.
Lepidotes’ teeth would often become separated from their jaws and, when fossilised, took on the appearance of perfectly formed little stones. Legend linked them to the mythical “jewels” that were said to exist in the heads of toads. This myth can be traced back to at least the time of the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder (AD23 to 79), and the idea is mentioned in As You Like It.
“Like tonguestones, toadstones were considered to be antidotes for poison and were also used in the treatment of epilepsy,” says Paul Taylor of the Natural History Museum. From the 14th century, toadstones were set in rings for their magical properties. The toadstone had to be taken from an old toad that was still alive, and, according to the 17th-century naturalist Edward Topsell, this could be done by placing a toad on a piece of red cloth, which caused it to cast out its stone.
Fossil trees and giant serpents
Lepidodendron is an extinct genus of a tree-like plant related to club mosses. They could sometimes grow to heights of 30 metres and have trunks a metre thick, and thrived during the Carboniferous period (360 to 300 million years ago).
Lepidodendrons had tall, thick trunks that rarely branched and were topped with a crown of branches bearing leaves. The leaf scars on their trunks and stems looked like tyre tracks or alligator skin.
Lepidodendrons’ rotted and compacted remains formed the coal seams exploited in Britain. After their leaves had fallen off, their trunks became covered with diamond-shaped scars, which resembled the scales of a reptile. As late as 1851 a specimen of this fossil tree was exhibited in Neath as a gigantic fossilised serpent. Visitors could view the 8ft-long specimen for the sum of one shilling (tradesmen six pence and working classes three pence).
Lepidodendrons are now known as scale trees.