One of the world’s great research depositories of animal bones, hides, feathers and DNA samples, the Field Museum this week opens a temporary exhibit on fantastic creatures that can be found in no natural history collection.
In “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids,” the expertise of zoologists, historians, anthropologists and paleontologists is tapped to explain how these and other mythic creatures came to exist, if only in people’s minds.
“We are trying to show the breadth and depth of human imagination,” said chief curator Laurel Kendall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. The New York institution created the exhibit in conjunction with the Field and three other museums.
The myth of giants, for example, could have arisen in classical Greek lore after ancient peoples came upon fossils and puzzled over their origins, paleontologists suggest. Gargantuan bones might have started the legend of human giants or given credence to existing legends.
“If you look in Greek literature to find the places the ancients said giants lived, you can do an overlay of a map of the Mediterranean region where modern paleontologists find dinosaur and woolly mammoth fossils,” said American Museum paleontologist Mark Norell.
The exhibit includes the cast of a huge skull, found in an island cave in ancient Greek times, that seems to have a single eyeball hole dead center in the forehead. To the early Greeks, this was evidence for the fierce one-eyed giants they called Cyclops. Artists of the time painted pictures of such skulls on pottery that survives to this day.
Modern zoologists, however, immediately recognize the bones for what they are: the skulls of pygmy elephants that once lived on the Greek islands until going extinct 100,000 to 300,000 years ago.
“The ancients had simply turned the skulls upside down, and the single hole they thought was for Cyclops’ eye is actually the skull opening where the elephant’s trunk attached,” Norell said.
For thousands of years, the half-woman, half-fish temptresses known as mermaids have figured into the lore of cultures all around the world. Christopher Columbus even reported in 1493 that he had spotted three mermaids off the coast of Haiti, complaining they were “not as pretty as they are depicted” by artists.
No known paleontological material explains the origins of the mermaid myth, but for more than 400 years South Pacific artisans supplied what passed in their day as convincing proof that mermaids were real. Using fish tails, dried-out monkey heads and arms, and artful papier-mache torsos, the artisans made mermaid “cadavers” that passing European and American sailors obtained in trade and took home.
One of these desiccated carcasses is in the exhibit, still looking pretty fishy and possibly being the famed “Feejee Mermaid” that showman P.T. Barnum showed off in his 19th Century exhibit hall of oddities in New York.
The museum exhibit mixes artifacts like the mermaid with sculptures of imaginary creatures, including a kraken, the sea monster familiar to fans of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films; a lifelike white unicorn; enormous, menacing bird creatures such as a roc and a griffin; and assorted dragons, both the menacing European versions and more benign Asian dragons.
Nobody knows for sure how the stories behind such mythological beasts got started, but scientists offer evidence for a number of possibilities.
The kraken, which grew out of 12th Century Norse literature as early Viking seafarers began to venture into the oceans, almost certainly were inspired by finding tentacles from giant squids floating ashore or at sea.
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“As other European sailors in the 15th and 16th Century ventured into the oceans for the first time, they assumed monsters in the deep to be real,” said Kendall. “Ships went down, and nobody knew what was below in the deep, deep seas, but their imaginations went wild.”
The griffin may well have been an idea dug up by gold miners.
“We think some of the griffin, the giant bird with the body of a lion, comes from the discovery of protoceratops skulls in ancient times,” said Kendall.
The sheep-size dinosaur once lived in what is now Mongolia, an area traveled 2,000 years ago by Persian nomads seeking to mine gold in the Gobi Desert. The desert, too, was rich with protoceratops fossils.
“Protoceratops was not a bird, but its snout resembled a beak, and the early artistic representations of griffins have heads that strongly resemble protoceratops,” Kendall said.
Similarly, many early European representations of dragons have heads that look suspiciously like the skulls of the extinct woolly rhinoceros.
The legend of unicorns has been around for thousands of years but may have originated in China, where early stylized art suggests it was inspired by the rhinoceros. In the earliest European depictions, unicorns resemble goats with a short, blunt horn.
But during the Renaissance, Kendall said, entrepreneurial Scandinavian traders took the long, spiral tusks of the narwhal into Europe and hinted they could be from unicorns.
Almost immediately the accepted image of the unicorn changed to the one still prevailing: a noble, white horse with a long, graceful horn.
American Museum officials in New York said this exhibit was its most popular in decades, with more than half a million visitors. It is traveling through 2012 to the four other museums that collaborated in putting it together, starting with the Field.
IF YOU GO
What: “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids.”
Where: Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive.
When: Opens Wednesday, runs through Sept. 1.
How much: $20 for adults ($22 for non-Chicago residents), $18 for students and seniors ($19 for non-residents) and 11 for children age 5 to 11 ($12 for non-residents), including general admission to the museum (the information on admission fees has been corrected in this text).
For more information: Call 312-922-9410 or visit www.fieldmuseum.org.
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