Ancient Fossil Discoveries and Interpretations by Adrienne Mayor Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life Ed. Gordon Linsay Campbell (Oxford, 2014) Abstract Observations of fossils, from stone shells and footprints in stone to the immense skeletons of dinosaurs and mammoths, influenced ancient myths and popular beliefs about strange creatures that had flourished and then vanished in the deep past. Analysis of literary evidence, from Homer and Herodotus to Pausanias and Augustine, demonstrates that bones, tusks, and teeth of remarkable size and shape, were exposed by erosion, earthquakes, or human activities, all around the Mediterranean world and in Central Asia. Scythian tales of gold-guarding griffins may have arisen from nomadic gold prospectors’ attempts to account for ubiquitous, well-preserved fossil skeletons of Protoceratops dinosaurs. Artistic and archaeological evidence for fossil discoveries in antiquity is rare but supports the literary record. Greeks and Romans identified large vertebrate fossils of long-extinct species as relics of giants, monsters, and heroes of myth. They collected, measured, and displayed impressive fossils, and speculated on the appearance, behavior, and reason for the disappearance of amazing creatures never seen alive. The ancient attempts to account for the presence of extraordinary fossil remains weathering out of the ground produced some surprisingly perceptive, rational insights about Earth’s history and past life forms—despite the silence of natural philosophers. The huge fossil bones of mastodons or mammoths are not likely to appear in anyone’s mental picture of classical antiquity. And yet for the ancient Greeks themselves, and their neighbors, the vestiges of mysterious, remarkable creatures from the remote past were important features of their natural and cultural landscape. Millions of years before the first humans appeared, the Mediterranean basin was not a sea, but a land mass connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia. During the Miocene through