A scholarly article once proposed that the griffin — a mythological beast with a raptor’s head, a lion’s body, and eagle’s wings — was created by ancient prospectors stumbling upon a dinosaur fossil while searching for gold in Central Asia.
But something about the argument didn’t feel right to Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, who with a colleague, now debunked the study over 30 years later in an Interdisciplinary Science Reviews article.
The idea, whose seed was planted by folklorist Adrienne Mayor in a 1989 Cryptozoology paper entitled, Paleocryptozoology: a call for collaboration between classicists and cryptozoologists, germinated in the public’s imagination. It grew after the publication of Mayor’s 2000 book The First Fossil Hunters, then became an element of more books, documentaries, and museum exhibits.
On one hand, the theory’s basis is commendable because it involves art history, folklore, archeology, and paleontology. But ...
