Most myths are grounded in some kind of reality, even those that include fantastical creatures such as gryphons, unicorns, cyclops, and dragons. That’s not to say these creatures ever existed, far from it, but there’s a real possibility they may have been inspired by creatures that did, once upon a time, roam the Earth.
The discovery of extinct animals isn’t a modern phenomenon; some of our ancestors were budding palaeontologists themselves and regularly came across the traces and remains of animals from by-gone eras.
Unlike us, however, they didn’t have modern science to guide their interpretations and instead relied heavily on their imaginations, reconstructing fossils based on the living animals they saw around them and exaggerated tales of exotic beasts from afar.
Not all of the prehistoric creatures on this list were long-dead by the time our ancestors found them. In fact, some lived alongside humans for thousands of years and may have ultimately faced extinction at the hands of humans. These prehistoric creatures will no doubt have inspired stories, some of which may have even survived generations of retellings and exist now as distorted cultural memories…
9 mythical monsters
Dragons
There are few mythological creatures more recognisable than dragons. These serpent-like beasts are central to myths that originated in both Western Europe and China, though the dragons of these particular tales do look very different - those from Western Europe have wings and typically breathe fire, while those from China lack wings and are a lot more snake-like in appearance.
The origins of dragon myths are heavily debated, with some suggesting they may be inspired by humans’ innate fear of snakes and others claiming they’re Frankenstein-like hybrids of many different living animals. However, some think they may have been spawned by the discoveries of dinosaur fossils, which are found all over the world.
One of the first to suggest this was Francis Buckland, son of William Buckland who described the first ever dinosaur Megalosaurus in 1824. He wrote, “May not the idea of dragons…owe their origin, in some way or another, to the veritable existence of these large lizards in former ages?”
We’ve actual evidence of some people misinterpreting fossils of prehistoric creatures as dragons. In 16th century Austria, a monstrous-looking skull was found in a gravel pit near the town of Klagenfurt. It was identified as a dragon’s skull and soon prompted the building of a statue depicting the beast in the town’s square. It wasn’t until a few hundred years later that a palaeontologist identified the skull as belonging to a woolly rhino from the ice age.
Unicorns
Like dragons, unicorns can also trace their origins back to both Europe and Asia. While those depicted by Europeans simply resemble a horse with a horn on its head, those from Asian accounts are a lot more mystical. These creatures are described as having the body of a deer, the tail and hooves of a cow, the limbs of a horse, and - of course - a huge horn.
Some think that unicorns, at least the Asian variety, may have been inspired by ancient discoveries of mummified woolly rhinos found flash-frozen in permafrost in Siberia, Russia. Others go one step further and suggest they may even be a cultural memory passed down from a time when humans lived alongside woolly rhinos in Eurasia until their extinction some 14,000 years ago.
While we’ve evidence of humans living alongside woolly rhinos, and even creating lifelike drawings of them on the walls of caves, a lot of researchers are sceptical that they inspired unicorns. These researchers think extant creatures like narwhals, or exaggerated tales of oryx and other horned animals by natural historians from Ancient Greece, are more likely to have spawned this particular myth.
Pouākai
The pouākai is a monstrous bird from Māori mythology that’s said to have terrorised villages and hunted humans. This myth is widely considered to be inspired by the very real but now extinct Haast’s eagle - the largest eagle ever found and the top predator on New Zealand’s South Island for thousands of years.
Haast’s eagle weighed ~18kg, making it twice as heavy as today’s largest eagle, the harpy eagle. It also had a wingspan of ~3m and a beak and set of talons that were specially designed for disembowelling its prey. While there’s no physical evidence of it hunting and killing humans, researchers suggest it would have been more than capable of doing so.
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Unlike other prehistoric creatures on this list, Haast’s eagle only faced extinction quite recently - in 1445 (roughly 200 years after the Māori first settled in New Zealand). It’s thought that the Māori drove Haast’s eagle to extinction by overhunting their favoured prey, flightless birds known as moas. These giants looked a lot like ostriches but at ~230kg they were nearly twice as heavy.
Gryphons
Gryphons make an appearance in a lot of different stories, from works of modern fiction like Harry Potter, to thousand-year-old tales from Ancient Greece.
Some suggest myths of these half-lion, half-eagle hybrids can trace their origins all the way back to nomads who hunted gold across the deserts of Central Asia 3,000 years ago. As well as finding gold, it’s said these prospectors also found fossils of Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus, two dinosaurs that - if you squint hard enough - look like gryphons, with their long bodies, four legs, and beaked skulls. These fossils were apparently shared with the ancient Greeks who popularised gryphons and created the classic image we all now recognise.
Not everyone agrees that Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus, distant cousins of Triceratops, inspired this particular myth. Palaeontologist Mark Witton contests the idea on the basis that depictions of hybrid animals with birds’ heads and mammals’ bodies were made long before the time that ancient Greeks met and traded with gold hunters from Central Asia.
The Cyclops
The ancient Greeks were fantastic story tellers and the likely creators of many mythical creatures, from gorgons to minotaurs. None of their ‘creations’, however, is better known than the cyclops, the one-eyed giant that Odysseus famously defeats in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey.
A now-popular theory behind the origin of the cyclops myth was first discussed by palaeontologist Othenio Abel in 1914. He proposed that the fossilised skulls of dwarf elephants, found in caves on islands in the Mediterranean, may have been misinterpreted by Greek explorers as belonging to a one-eyed monster. These skulls have a large, singular hole at their centre, which looks a lot like an eye socket and not immediately like an attachment point for a long, fleshy trunk.
The cyclops from Homer’s epic poem lived on a remote island, traditionally thought to be Sicily. We now know that Sicily, and other islands in the Mediterranean, were home to at least two different species of miniature elephants during the Pleistocene, ~200,000 years ago.
The Bunyip
Australia was once home to giant marsupials, relatives of today’s kangaroos and koalas. The largest amongst them was Diprotodon, a 1.8m-tall, wombat-like creature that was Australia’s answer to rhinos, elephants, and hippos. They lived during the Pleistocene and ultimately faced extinction 40,000 years ago, around 10,000 years after humans first set foot in Australia.
The Bunyip, a semi-aquatic, dog-faced man-eater from Aboriginal Australian mythology, is thought to have been inspired by Diprotodon. Some suggest that aboriginal legends of this monster may have stemmed from finds of fossilised bones, or even cultural memories of the time when the first Australians lived alongside Diprotodon.
No matter how stories of the Bunyip originated, the animal it’s supposedly based on was no man-eater. Diprotodon was a strict vegetarian and gathered in large herds to protect itself from the actual predators of the time, marsupial lions known as Thylacoleo.
Mapinguari
Everyone has heard of bigfoot, a shaggy, ape-like creature that cryptozoologists swear still roams the forests of the Pacific Northwest. A similar yet lesser-known cryptid is also said to dwell in the Amazon rainforest - mapinguari.
There are several different depictions of mapinguari, but traditional Brazilian folklore depicts it as a large, hairy giant with one eye and, curiously, a gaping mouth in its abdomen.
No creature, living or extinct, looks quite like this described monstrosity, but that hasn’t stopped some from speculating that mapinguari may have been inspired by the ground sloths that lived in the Americas and alongside humans during the last few thousands years of the Pleistocene. These ancestors of today’s tree sloths were huge, hairy, and often stood on their hindlimbs to reach the leaves and fruits of trees.
It’s possible that ground sloths may have spawned this particular myth, but there’s certainly no basis to the cryptozoologists' claim that there’s a small population of ground sloths still living in the Amazon. As a group, ground sloths were incredibly diverse but like the majority of America's other ice age megafauna they ultimately faced extinction 12,000 years ago.
Snake stones
If you’ve ever visited the Jurassic Coast in southern England, or the beaches around north east Yorkshire, then you’ll have probably stumbled across a fossilised ammonite. These coiled molluscs were incredibly abundant during the time of the dinosaurs and actually faced extinction at the same time, around 66 million years ago.
Just as they are today, ammonites were commonly found by many historic and prehistoric peoples. In the 7th century, people in the town of Whitby, north east Yorkshire, believed that ammonites were snakes that had been turned into stones. According to legend, St Hilda was tasked with ridding the region from an infestation of snakes. She set a spell on the snakes, turning them to stone before hurling them from cliff tops and onto the beaches where they’d later be found.
Ammonites are also mentioned in folklore from elsewhere in the world. In Ancient Rome, it was widely believed that sleeping with an ammonite under your pillow would help you predict the future.
Ebu Gogo
The Ebu Gogo are a group of diminutive, human-like creatures that are said to dwell in the forests of Flores, one of Indonesia’s Lesser Sunda Islands. For a long time they were thought to have been inspired by monkeys, but their origins were reconsidered after fossilised remains of small, primitive hominins, later described as Homo floresiensis, were discovered on the island in 2003.
These hominins, nicknamed Hobbits after J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous creations, were small, hairy, and had wide, flat noses - just like the depictions of the Ebu Gogo - and they lived on Flores from one million years ago to 50,000 years ago. What exactly they were is still debated. Some suggest they were a group of Homo erectus subject to island dwarfism; others that they were ancestors of an undetected migration of more primitive hominins out of Africa, such as Homo habilis.
It’s unlikely that myths of the Ebu Gogo stem from cultural memories of Homo floresiensis, since humans didn’t arrive on Flores until a few thousand years after they became extinct. What’s more likely is that these myths stem from finds of fossilised Homo floresiensis remains, or rather just exaggerated sightings of monkeys.
There may be small morsels of truth at the heart of many myths and legends, but it’s nigh on impossible to trace them back to a single point of origin and therefore prove they were inspired by real-life, prehistoric creatures.
All we can really do is speculate as to their origins. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to think how our ancestors may have interpreted the remains of extinct animals and how those interpretations may have shaped their view of the world around them.