Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.
I’ve read a couple books on this actually, thats exactly what happened. Also cyclops are from looking at bones from a certain type of baby elephant. The giant note hole and tiny eyes made it look like a single eye.
Yep, can confirm! And what’s even funnier to me is that back in the dark ages, Greek people used to find a lot of prehistoric bear skeletons - and those look exactly like human skeletons, except they’re like eight feet tall or something - so they naturally assumed those were the heroes of legend, and made armour and clothes for them and reburied them with the most splendid and sacred religious ceremonies they could think of? Fast forward five centuries, Athens’ all modern and rational, philosophers and scientists aren’t taking any shit from anyone - but the problem is, people will randomly find graves containing giant-ass warriors, so that’s something that can’t be explained away and yeah, demigods were a thing and yeah, they used to be eight feet tall and sorry I don’t make the rules.
Some scientists suspect that the origin of the cyclops myths came about because of elephant skulls, which are vaguely human in shape but with a honking big hole in the middle for the trunk but easily mistakable for an eye socket without any flesh
These hypotheses are heavily debated so I want to be clear when posting that this is in no way 100% fact.
…but I also want to add that the dinosaur Protoceratops or similar genera are hypothesized by folk scientist Adrienne Mayor to have been partially responsible for the griffin myth.
(via wikipedia commons)
I mean, yeah, I can sorta see how someone could mistake that for some half-bird, half-mammal beast, especially with incomplete remains that fossils almost always have as well as the lack of knowledge of what a dinosaur is.
Whether or not it’s true? Who really knows at this point, but it’s fun to think about.
Adrienne Mayor has a book out called The First Fossil Hunters on this exact topic if anyone is interested. I haven’t read it myself though so I couldn’t tell you how good or bad it is!
A picture of Freddie Oversteegen, a Dutch girl who was the unsuspecting killer of dozens of Nazis. Along with her friend Hannie and her sister Truus, the girls worked with a team from the Dutch Resistance to lure men into the woods for a promised kiss. Once they reached a remote location, the men got a bullet to the head instead.
Freddie passed away today on the 5th of September 2018, one day before her 93rd birthday.
i scrolled by this tweet 3 times before I actually read the entire thing, and the only reason I eventually read the whole thing is because of the brad pitt gif in the reblogs.
She is innovative
Seeing the brad pit gif is the only reason I went back to read the post and I feel attacked 😹😹😹
