After appearing in the early Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, the griffin has earned a generous place as a mythical beast in modern popular culture, gaining even more weight from other fantasy works and video games inspired by its imagery. Turned into one of the most recognizable monsters of today, it seems unbelievable that the myth of the griffin has been closely related for centuries to dinosaur fossils.
With representations ranging from Ancient Greece to Egypt, the legend of a creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle has become a symbol that has accompanied us for thousands of years. Although many of these monsters have disappeared or faded over the passage of cultures and civilizations, the griffin is one of the few that has the honor of appearing in a work by Herodotus in 484 BC and serving as a mount in World of Warcraft and other video games.
The paleontological origin of the griffin myth
The key to its longevity lies in the fact that, transformed into a symbol associated with royalty and the protection of treasures and sacred objects, it jumped from those early myths to the symbols of shields and coats of arms of the Middle Ages as a representation of power and vigilance, and from there, to become part of the stories and legends that have shaped the fantasy science fiction and sorcery of phenomena like Dungeons & Dragons and derivative works.
However, it is curious that, from its origin associated with serving as a custodian of mountains of gold, at a certain point in history its origin was related to something much more earthly, dinosaur fossils. In fact, in recent years, the theory has grown that the reason that led to that idea stems from the discovery by the ancients of the skeleton of a Protoceratops.
With artistic representations dating back to the fourth millennium BC, the belief that these relatives of the Triceratops, about two meters long with a beak similar to that of birds, led cryptozoologists to think that, during gold searches in Central Asia, they came across Protoceratops bones that shaped the myth.
Finding four-legged skeletons with beaks and skull extensions that could be considered wings, it is not difficult to find some sense in the story. However, recent studies on the origin of griffins in popular culture seem to point more to the imaginary than to the unlikely discovery of those fossils.
As Dr. Mark Witton and Dr. Richard Hing, paleontologists from the University of Portsmouth, pointed out, “everything related to the origins of griffins is consistent with their traditional interpretation as imaginary beasts, and their appearance can be completely explained by being chimeras of large felines and birds of prey. Invoking a role for dinosaurs in the tradition of griffins, especially with species from distant lands like the Protoceratops, not only introduces unnecessary complexity and inconsistencies in their origins, but also is based on interpretations and proposals that do not withstand scrutiny.”
According to the paleontologists behind the research, the key seems to be the fact that it seems unlikely that the gold seekers came across a complete specimen that would have led them to that assumption. Furthermore, it is still complex today to extract these types of fossils from rock, so it is hard to believe that the tools of the time would have helped them to perform such a complicated task.
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