The legendary hybrid creature known as the gryphon was said to have the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Despite this fantastical descriptions the ancient Greeks and Romans truly seemed to have believed that gryphons were real animals. It was thought that gryphons lived in arid steppes and deserts of central Asia where they guarded stashes of gold. Stories of gryphons made their way to Mediterranean by way of the nomadic Scythian people, who hunted for gold in the gryphon’s homeland. Stanford Professor Adrienne Mayor thinks she may have solved the mystery of this puzzling creature. Could the gryphon stories be an early form of paleontology? Tune-in and find out how giant hoaxes, paleo-art, and one eyed gold hunters all play a role in the story.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/whats-wrong-with-these-dinosaur-reconstructions.html

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Fox, Sherry C. The Historian, vol. 65, no. 4, Wiley, 2003, pp. 1067–68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24452577.

Mayor, Adrienne. “Fossil Discoveries in Classical Antiquity.” The Classical Outlook, vol. 77, no. 4, American Classical League, 2000, pp. 137–43, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43938348.

Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton University Press, 2011.

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