Enlarge / Portray of a gryphon, or griffin, a lion-raptor chimera from historic folklore. (credit score: Mark Witton)
The gryphon, or griffin, is a legendary creature courting again to classical antiquity, sporting the physique, legs, and tail of a lion and the wings, head, and entrance talons of an eagle. For the reason that 1980s, a well-liked “geomyth” has unfold that the griffin’s distinctive look was impressed by the fossilized skeleton of a horned dinosaur referred to as Protoceratops. It is an enchanting and colourful story, however in keeping with the authors of a brand new paper printed within the journal Interdisciplinary Science Evaluations, there is no such thing as a laborious proof to help such a connection.
“The whole lot about griffin origins is in line with their conventional interpretation as imaginary beasts, simply as their look is fully defined by them being [mythological] chimeras of huge cats and raptorial birds,” mentioned co-author Mark Witton, a paleontologist on the College of Portsmouth. “Invoking a job for dinosaurs in griffin lore, particularly species from distant lands like Protoceratops, not solely introduces pointless complexity and inconsistencies to their origins, but additionally depends on interpretations and proposals that don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
There are representations of griffin-like creatures in historic Egyptian artwork dated to earlier than 3000 BCE, whereas in historic Greek and Roman texts the creatures had been related to gold deposits in Central Asia. By the Center Ages, griffins had been frequent figures in medieval iconography and in heraldry. The hippogriff named Buckbeak in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a associated legendary creature, the product of a griffin and a mare.
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