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argued that these mythical griffins are literary descriptions of real, albeit extinct, monsters. 5 These creatures are not pure fantasy, but actually appear to have zoological origins.
    The first known use of the Greek word
gryph
, meaning “hooked” like a claw, occurs in the writings of Aristeas in the seventh century BCE . Aristeas’sbook
Arimaspea
is now lost but it was popular in the ancient world and chronicled his travels into Central Asia, where he encountered the Scythian people, a Greek term referring to all the nomadic people who lived between the Black Sea and Mongolia. Over two hundred years later we find Aeschylus relying on the
Arimaspea
for scene-setting details in his
Prometheus Bound
tragedy, set in Asia. Aeschylus describes a frightening land where live the Phorcides, old mumbling maids, swan-shaped, having only one eye and tooth to share between them; the Gorgons, three sisters with snakes for hair who kill you if you gaze at them; fierce griffins; and a race of one-eyed nomadic men called Arimaspeans, who mine the region for its rich gold deposits. Herodotus (484–425 BCE ), who traveled through western Scythia himself, also cited Aristeas and tried to corroborate the additional claim that these one-eyed nomadic men were in constant combat with the griffins, who apparently nested in the gold-saturated sands of the region.
    For the next six hundred years or so the legend of the griffins expanded and received further nuances from the ancient writers Ctesias, Pliny, and Appolonius. The basic anatomy of this Greek version of the monster, a giant quadruped with a sharp beak, echoes peculiar representations from Scythian art dating back to the eighth century BCE . Scythian tombs, originally created during the time of Herodotus and Aeschylus, were excavated in the twentieth century by Russian archaeologists, revealing scores of gold figurines of beaked quadrupeds.
    These cultural convergences regarding the morphology and environment of the griffins suggest that more than fable held this monster together. The regions between the Altai and Tien Shan mountains are extremely rich in fossil deposits, and in the 1920s the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews began searching this region after hearing Chinese folklore about dragons’ teeth and bones. He discovered massive fields of windblown strata with the skeletons of late Cretaceous dinosaurs strewn over the landscape. Perhaps the most eerie sight was a giant nesting ground of Protoceratops, with juvenile skeletons and even fossilized egg clutches. 6 Andrews was the first to dig out over one hundred Protoceratops from this land, but if Adrienne Mayor is correct, Andrews was not the first to discover these bones; they were regularly picked up and examined by ancient Scythian nomads between 800 BCE and 300 CE . A skeleton of a Protoceratops, and especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur (also found in the Dzungarian basin), looks exactly as you might imagine a gryph skeleton to look. Mayor summarizes the matter:
The most common remains, including eggs and young, are of the Protoceratops (ceratops means “horned head”). This creature appears to combinethe features of a mammal and bird of prey in a striking way. The body is about seven or eight feet long, and resembles that of a carnivore, but the skull has a powerful beak. The large nostrils and eye sockets and the knobs and frills of protoceratopsids (and distinct skulls, beaks, and giant claws of other dinosaur species) may explain the features of the archaic images of the gryps (and might account for some other unidentified animals in Scythian art).
     

     
    A skeleton of a Protoceratops, especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur found in the Dzungarian basin, looks exactly as you might imagine a griffin skeleton. Attempts to make sense of dinosaur fossils certainly stimulated monster speculations in the ancient world. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based