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on a sketch by Albrecht Dürer.
    Russian archaeologists excavating throughout the first half of the twentieth century discovered more than one hundred ancient gold mines in this area of Central Asia, some dating back to 1500 BCE . Mayor and MichaelHeaney speculate that nomads and traders sifted these areas for gold for centuries, regularly stumbling on the skeletons of frightening creatures that seemed to have perished in a series of large-scale battles with their neighbor enemies, the mythical one-eyed Arimaspeans. For the nomads, this would constitute a very plausible story for how these animals became extinct, or how they came to be absent in current times.
MONSTROUS BONES
     
    This raises an interesting point about extinction in general. Today, living on the other side of Darwin, we dig monsters out of the ground all the time and have theoretical concepts such as evolution and extinction to make perfect sense out of why we don’t see monsters walking among us anymore. But the intellectual landscape of ancient Greece was quite different from our own, and ideas such as evolution were marginal. So how, generally, did the ancients understand the monstrous bones they discovered? Were the creatures really extinct? Were the bones representative of species or just isolated giant individuals? Did these creatures continue to live on elsewhere, in distant lands?
    Pliny the Elder gives us an idea of how the ancients viewed fossils in his account of a giant skeleton found near Joppa (present-day Tel Aviv), interpreted to be the skeleton of a huge Triton, a kind of merman. 7 He seems quite confident that Tritons exist and reports that Emperor Tiberius was assured of their existence by ambassadors from Olisipo (Lisbon). He adds credibility to his belief in Tritons by invoking “two illustrious knights” who witnessed, near Gades (Cadiz, Spain), the giant mermen climbing onto the sides of ships to sit, occasionally capsizing boats in the process. These bones caused quite a stir when brought to the imperial capital. “The bones of this monster, to which Andromeda was said to have been exposed, were brought by Marcus Scaurus from Joppa in Judaea during his aedileship and shown at Rome among the rest of the amazing items displayed. The monster was over 40 feet long, and the height of its ribs was greater than that of Indian elephants, while its spine was 1 and 1/2 feet thick.” 8
    We have additional evidence that the ancients were aware of and intrigued by giant fossils (Miocene and Pleistocene mammals), but of course they didn’t have a modern concept of such vanished species or a concept of geological time. Suetonius (69–130 CE ) tells us in
Lives of the Caesars
that Caesar Augustus liked to display fossils in his home: “His own villas, which were modest enough, he decorated not so much with handsome statues and pictures as with terraces, groves, and objects noteworthyfor their antiquity and rarity; for example, at Capreae the monstrous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called the ‘bones of the giants,’ and the ‘weapons of the heroes.’” 9

     
    The Cyclops legend was fueled by ancient Greek misinterpretations of mastodon skulls found in Mediterranean caves. Pencil drawing and collage by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.
    It’s not entirely clear whether the ancients conceived of their monsters as extinct species. 10 The examples above suggest that the creatures were believed to be rare but not entirely gone. One wonders, for example, if the exaggerated three-horned monster that Alexander faced at the sweet water lake (called an Odontotyrannus or “tooth-tyrant”) was a fantasy based on the author’s encounter with a fossil skull. The Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel (1875–1945) argued in 1914 that the Greek myths of the Cyclopes were grounded in people’s encounters with fossil elephantskulls, which are plentiful in Mediterranean coastal caves. The large nasal cavity in the center of the skull looks very