Genesis "kinds" may be Nested Hierarchies.

Hi RAZD, hope you are well.I have to sound a note of scepticism here; I don't think that stories of dragons and griffins are based upon fossils.The notion that dragons were inspired by dinosaur or marine reptile bones has little to no evidence for it. Insofar as dinosaur fossils were associated with dragons, it seems just as likely that it was the other way around, i.e. someone looked at a fossil and it reminded them of pre-existing stories about dragons.The protoceratops origin for griffins is extremely dubious. The usual version of this tale is that griffins were based upon the protoceratops fossils found by Scythian gold-miners and that griffin-lore entered Greek culture when those cultures first came into contact. The problem with this is that griffin iconography pre-dates this by some thousands of years. Lots of ancient Near East cultures depicted griffins and they definitely weren't inspired by Mongolian fossils.There's a good essay on this topic here; Why Protoceratops almost certainly wasn't the inspiration for the griffin legend.Personally, I find the dragon connection tenuous and I definitely don't believe the griffin theory. I think that these are simply imaginary monsters, exaggerated, mythic versions of real animals. The griffin in particular seems to be just an animal chimera. I don't see any particularly strong to need to explain these stories beyond the fact that people have very rich imaginations. As a keen Dungeons and Dragons player, I know just how hard it is to imagine a new monster that isn't essentially some combination of elements taken from existing organisms and I think that's all that's going on here. I think that people have been creating imaginary animal mash-ups for a long time and I think that when the Greeks said that a griffin was a combination of a bird and a big cat, they meant exactly that.Mutate and Survive

You clearly have a very vivid imagination. I don't see it myself. I don't think that this; looks anything like this; For starters, the head on the dragon is large, often much larger than depicted here, where the plesiosaur has a more modest head. The dragon has deer-like antlers, which the plesiosaur lacks. The dragon has a long, sinuous body, whereas the plesiosaur's body is a good deal fatter about the middle. Perhaps most conspicuously, the dragon has legs, replete with extremely large talons (and again, this example has competitively modest talons compared to some), where the plesiosaur has flippers. There are numerous other differences. I don't think that they look alike at all.I'm also somewhat puzzled as to why you would choose the plesiosaur as your comparison, since there is a long-standing association in China between dragons and fossil dinosaur bones and eggs. This whole idea may well be true in China, but if it is, it is usually mentioned in terms of dinosaurs being the models for dragons, not marine reptiles. The dragon illustrated above looks more like a dinosaur than a plesiosaur; at least dinosaurs actually had legs.I do think that there is strong evidence of an association between dragons and dinosaur fossils in China, but I don't see any such evidence for Europe and the Near East and even in China, we have no way of knowing whether the fossil inspired the myth or whether the myth explained the fossil. The discovery had to wait for actual fossils to be unearthed and fossil ceratopsians are thin on the ground in the areas associated with the griffin myth. Take a look at this distribution map for ceratopsian fossils; That doesn't exactly match up with the origins of griffin iconography. For this idea to be true the myth-makers had to have seen fossil ceratopsians. We have no reason to suppose that they did and every reason to think it unlikely. If the myth came first and the skeletons were linked to the myth at a later date then the skeletons weren't the origin for the myth. It seems perfectly plausible to imagine that people saw Protoceratops fossils and thought that they looked like griffins, but it seems extremely unlikely that the fossils actually inspired the original myth. They just didn't have access to the fossils. Sure, it's possible. But it's not an example of a fossil inspiring a myth. That's an example of a myth being inspired by the interactions of two (then) living populations. Well, people certainly do behave that way, whence stories of "devil's toenails" (grypheas) and "snake-stones" (ammonites) here in the UK. As caffeine said, the idea isn't intrinsically absurd and in some cases it may be true. It's just that it's very difficult to prove and in many cases the positive evidence is weak or non-existent. They certainly weren't and I think that brings up an important point; mythic creatures like griffins and dragons weren't viewed just as big scary animals, they held symbolic value. The griffin is a combination of lion and eagle, both animals symbolic of strength, ferocity and nobility. It's not just a physical combination, it's a combination of these allegorical attributes. I think that such considerations were extremely important to the cultural role played by monster stories. Explaining natural phenomena was likely a secondary consideration compared with such symbolic concerns. A combination of lion and eagle is a good enough notion in and of itself. It doesn't really require further explanation. I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. The earliest griffin art is from Egypt in about 3000 BCE. By that time they may well have been well along the path to specialisation and differentiation of trades. The people who told the stories may not have been the ones who did the hunting and butchering. Or the myth may have much earlier origins than the first appearance of griffins in the archaeological record, dating back to hunter-gatherer times. At this remove it's hard to know, but then, that's my take on all of this, it's almost entirely supposition, with no way to really know. Your fascination notwithstanding, I think that I made it perfectly clear that I don't think that. I think that there were no Protoceratops fossils in the ancient Near East, thus, they could not have been inspired by them.I could always turn this around of course. You ever see a wild eagle? You're the outdoorsy type, so I'm guessing you probably have. Impressive aren't they? Awe-inspiring even. Seeing wild lions must have been even more impressive. It seems to me that these large, powerful predatory animals would fuelled the human imagination much more than any pile of old bones. And then there's the fact that people in the ANE would actually have seen eagles and lions, but not Protoceratops fossils, which were located thousands of miles away.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.