Fossil elephant skulls may explain the one-eyed Cyclopes of Greek myth
Skulls of Deinotherium giganteum, an elephant relative found in Crete and Greece, have a large opening at the front that looks like a single eye socket. It is really the gap for the trunk. Since the 13th century, scholars have suggested these finds may have given rise to the legend of the Cyclopes.
A fossil is any preserved remnant, impression or trace of a living thing from a past geological age, including bones, shells, petrified wood, footprints, droppings and objects caught in amber. The word comes from the Latin fossilis, obtained by digging. Specimens range from bacteria a micrometre across to a Sequoia trunk 88 metres long at Coaldale, Nevada. The oldest date back somewhere between 3.48 and 4.1 billion years. Usually only the hardest parts survive, such as teeth, bones and shells.
People were collecting fossils long before anyone understood them. Paleolithic toolmakers in Europe set fossil sea urchins precisely into the grips of stone knives, and drilled round fossil shells to wear as beads. Ancient Egyptians kept bones of hippo-like species in temples of the god Set. Pliny the Elder described tongue stones, which were fossil shark teeth, and horns of Ammon, which gave ammonites their name. In Japan, shark teeth were thought to be claws of the mythical tengu, and in medieval China, fossil mammal bones were mistaken for dragon bones and used as medicine.
Some observers got remarkably close to the truth. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes, seeing seashells in mountains, proposed that a great flood had once buried creatures in mud. Around 1088, the Song dynasty scholar Shen Kuo argued that marine fossils far inland meant a shoreline had shifted over time, and petrified bamboo in a dry northern region led him to early ideas about gradual climate change. Leonardo da Vinci later pointed out that a flood could not explain shells found in orderly groups.
Science eventually turned folklore into chronology. In the 19th century, researchers noticed that particular fossils consistently appear in particular rock layers, which led to the geological timescale. Radiometric dating, developed in the early 20th century, then allowed absolute ages to be measured, making fossils one of the foundations of evolutionary biology.
Source: Fossil
