Buzz
The first dinosaur bones were not uncovered by scientists. They were found thousands of years ago by early humans who couldn't comprehend what they were seeing.
Ancient humans stumbled upon fossils just as we do today, trying their best to figure out what these strange remains were. Some would encounter femurs as large as a grown man or enormous rib cages as wide as a building.
A few records offer clues about how they made sense of these discoveries, providing rare insights into what it might have been like to come across dinosaur remains thousands of years ago.
10. The Giant's Battlefield
“Long before humans existed,” wrote the Greek historian Solinus 1,800 years ago, “there was a great battle fought between gods and giants.”
To Solinus, this wasn’t a myth. He was convinced that giants had once roamed the Earth. He had seen their bones himself.
Solinus was recounting a story about Pallene, a town in Greek mythology where Heracles supposedly wiped out a tribe of unruly giants. According to Solinus, every time it rained, enormous bones would emerge from the earth “like human remains but much larger.”
For many years, Solinus was dismissed as a fabricator. Then in 1994, after a rainstorm hit the area once known as Pallene, a local man found what he believed to be a giant’s tooth. The site became the focus of a paleontological excavation, revealing the remains of ancient mastodons.
The Greeks had only discovered the remains one bone at a time. With no understanding of mastodons, they believed they were looking at the remains of enormous humans. To them, this was solid evidence that they had built their town atop a giant burial ground.
9. The Water Creatures of the Badlands
The Lakota people held that the Badlands of South Dakota were once the battleground for an epic struggle between the spirits of water, thunder, and lightning.
The water spirits were colossal monsters known as Unktehi, who waged a fierce war against a flock of thunderbirds called Wakinyan, which ravaged the entire area. The Wakinyan scorched the forests, boiled the seas, and left nothing but a barren, burnt land behind.
The Lakota believed that the only remnants left were the bones of the dead monsters, still scattered across the scorched land.
Those bones truly exist in the South Dakota Badlands. Years later, paleontologists found that the region was a treasure trove of dinosaur fossils. There, they uncovered the remains of marine reptiles known as mosasaurs and flying reptiles called pterosaurs, all of which perished around 100 million years ago.
It’s believed that the Lakota legend originated from their discovery of these bones. They came across the remains of creatures that indeed were monsters of the water and air, living in what was once an ancient sea.
It’s a safe assumption that the pterosaurs didn’t actually possess lightning powers. But aside from that, the Lakotas’ tale wasn’t too far from reality.
8. The Cyclical Universe of Xenophanes
Not every fossil was misinterpreted as a mythical creature. Some ancient individuals made an effort to approach it with a scientific mindset.
When the Greek philosopher Xenophanes discovered fossilized seashells on a mountain, he took a more rational approach. He believed they were likely nothing more than what they appeared to be: remains of shellfish now found on dry land.
Xenophanes argued that these fossils were evidence that the mountains had once been submerged underwater, however many millennia ago. This occurred in the sixth century BC—and Xenophanes was absolutely correct.
However, he pushed his conclusions further than modern scientists. He believed that the entire Earth had once been covered in water and that humans had emerged from a primordial slime. So far, this view isn’t too different from our contemporary understanding of the world.
However, he asserted that the cycle would continue indefinitely. Xenophanes believed that eventually, the world would once again sink beneath the sea and humanity would return to mud. Then, humanity would rise again, and the never-ending cycle of history would repeat.
7. The Stone Chakras of Vishnu
In a village called Salagrama in Nepal, fossilized seashells were found in abundance. However, the people who discovered them arrived at a completely different conclusion about their nature. They believed they had uncovered the chakras of the four-armed god Vishnu.
According to Hindu tradition, Vishnu held a stone disc known as the Sudarshana Chakra in one of his hands. The villagers believed that these seashells were Vishnu’s chakra, turned to stone by a demon’s curse.
An ancient legend tells that Vishnu was cursed to turn into stone after disguising himself as the demon Jalandhara in order to deceive Jalandhara’s wife, Vrinda, into sleeping with him. Upon realizing the man in her bed was not her husband, Vrinda’s fury led her to curse Vishnu, transforming him into stone, grass, trees, and plants.
For centuries, Hindus held these seashells as sacred artifacts. They believed the shells were Vishnu’s chakras, turned to stone, broken off, and left behind on Earth. In essence, they were regarded as the most holy objects a Hindu could ever find.
6. The Fields of Dragon Bones
Chinese travelers once avoided entering the deserts of Issedonia, convinced that the land had once been haunted by demons and dragons. The proof was still there: vast fields of white dragon bones.
Issedonia struck a particular fear into their hearts, but it wasn’t the only place filled with dragon bones. The Chinese believed they could be found across the entire nation. In the I Ching, a farmer discovering dragon bones in his field was seen as a “good omen.” And in the second century BC, a canal was named the “Dragon-Head Waterway” because “dragon bones were found” at that location.
Historian Adrienne Mayor suggests that the origins of these myths can be traced back to farmers discovering the huge bones of extinct animals, and her theory holds strong evidence. As recently as 1919, China still displayed exhibits of dragon bones—some of which are now housed in paleontological collections.
However, the bones were from extinct species of horses and deer. They had fossilized into such dense, peculiar shapes that the ancient people could not fathom that they came from anything less than mystical creatures.
5. The Shoulder Blade of Pelops
An ancient Greek fisherman once cast his net into the sea and pulled up an unexpected find. It was a long, slender, white bone, far too large to have belonged to anything he had ever encountered before.
After some panic, the fisherman took the bone to the oracle, who immediately identified it. She proclaimed that it was the shoulder blade of a demigod. According to her, the bone belonged to Pelops, the son of Tantalus and grandson of Zeus, who was said to have a shoulder made of pure ivory.
As the tale goes, Pelops fought and perished in the Trojan War. When the Greeks attempted to return his body, a fierce storm struck their ship, casting Pelops’s remains into the sea. The oracle claimed that the body had remained there until the fisherman uncovered it.
The bone was eventually displayed at the Temple of Artemis, and the fisherman and his family, now seen as divinely favored, were named the official guardians of Pelops’s remains. However, they didn’t manage to keep it safe, as the bone was gone by AD 150.
What the fisherman actually discovered remains a mystery. However, the prevailing theory is that he found the tusk of a woolly mammoth, possibly worn down by years underwater until it resembled an ivory shoulder bone.
4. The Bones of Antaeus
Two thousand years ago, the people of Tingis believed their town was built on the burial site of an enormous giant named Antaeus. He was said to have founded their city and lived among them until he met his demise at the hands of Heracles in a fatal wrestling match.
To the Romans, this story sounded like pure superstition. When Roman commander Quintus Sertorius visited Tingis, he was determined to prove the locals wrong. He was taken to the giant’s alleged burial mound, which Sertorius’s men dug up, expecting to find nothing to validate the tale.
However, to Sertorius’s astonishment, his men uncovered an enormous skeleton. While they probably found only a few bones, they returned claiming to have discovered the remains of a man standing 26 meters (85 ft) tall.
Sertorius, now humbled, ordered the remains to be reburied, reluctantly acknowledging that this might indeed be the grave of a legendary figure. Although the exact truth remains unclear, we have a fairly good idea of what he uncovered.
Today, the burial mound is a significant excavation site for Pliocene-Miocene fossils, where the remains of ancient mammoths, whales, and massive ancestors of the giraffe have been uncovered. One of these creatures likely left the bones that Sertorius unearthed.
3. Shen Kuo’s Dream Pool Essays
When Shen Kuo, a Chinese scholar of the 11th century AD, examined ancient fossils, he didn’t attribute them to mythical creatures or magic. Instead, he proposed explanations so advanced that the rest of the world wouldn’t embrace them for nearly a thousand years.
In his work Dream Pool Essays, Shen Kuo argued that the world’s landscape had been molded over millions of years through processes like mountain erosion, uplift, and the deposition of silt. His theory was partly inspired by fossilized seashells found in the Taihang Mountains, hundreds of miles from the coast.
Observing the shells and the erosion of the mountains, Shen Kuo concluded that the mountains had moved over thousands of years, proposing an idea that closely resembles the modern concept of tectonic shifts.
Using petrified bamboo found in northern China, Shen Kuo suggested that the Earth had experienced dramatic climate changes. He posited that the bamboo could only have thrived if northern China had once been much warmer—an assertion that is now scientifically validated.
The Western world wouldn’t truly begin embracing Shen Kuo’s theories until the 19th century—nearly a thousand years after his time. Shen Kuo was a millennium ahead of his era.
2. The Mythical Graveyards Of The Mahabharata
One of the central Hindu tales is the Mahabharata, a grand epic depicting a battle among heroes, gods, and monstrous beings.
There are several renditions of this tale, but the most extravagant version tells of a single conflict with millions of soldiers on both sides. Countless elephants, horses, and chariots were deployed in the battle, leaving a sea of rotting corpses when the dust settled.
Even the gods took part in this battle. Shiva, Krishna, and Rama all descended to fight, culminating in a legendary showdown between the giant Bhima and the immensely powerful Duryodhana. The legend claims that Bhima ripped Duryodhana apart before being struck down by a divine thunderbolt.
Historian Alexandra van der Geer suggests that this myth may have roots in ancient fossils. The Siwalik Hills, the battleground in the legend, is home to the remains of two distinct kinds of ancient creatures.
The first type includes giant tortoises, Stegodons, saber-toothed tigers, and four-horned giraffes, which perished millions of years ago. Interestingly, the same hills are also home to bronze javelins and spears from a real battle fought millennia ago.
Van der Geer suggests that the ancient Indians might have discovered old weapons alongside the remains of unimaginable creatures. The people likely believed they had uncovered a legendary battlefield, where humans once fought alongside monsters.
1. The Black Bones Of Set
Between 1300 and 1200 BC, the ancient Egyptians unearthed at least 3 tons of fossils. They found the remains of enormous, extinct species of hippos, crocodiles, boars, horses, antelopes, buffaloes, and more during a massive excavation.
We can only imagine what the ancient Egyptians thought when they found these bones. No written records from this ancient dig have survived, leaving us with only the remains and our best speculations.
All the fossils discovered were a deep shade of black. When the Egyptians came upon them, they likely believed the remains were divine in nature. After transporting these bones across great distances, they placed them in shrines dedicated to Set, the god of darkness and chaos.
The Egyptians meticulously wrapped the fossils in linen and placed them in rock-carved tombs, as if offering a solemn burial to distinguished beings. It’s possible they believed these bones belonged to gods or even followers of Set. What we know for certain is that they remained wrapped in linen and undisturbed for over 3,000 years, only to be discovered in 1922.
