Protoceratops
Bob
Back when dinosaur remains were originally discovered, the idea of
natural history would have been even more alien than the fossils
themselves. It's not known of course when or where exactly a human
being first came across the skull of a dinosaur, but the earliest
encounter on record can be estimated from a legend the Greeks borrowed
from Central Asia in the seventh century B.C. According to some
folklorists, pre-Christian oral tales from Greece and Rome describe
the griffin, a half-bird, half-mammal that guarded large amounts of
gold in the Altai Mountains along now what is the border between
Mongolia and China. Griffins walked on all fours and had wings that
originated in the shoulder region, a horn rising from the top of their
head, and a large beak. Immediately south of the Altai Mountains,
which is a highly productive gold mining region, lies the Gobi Desert,
where a particular section of sedimentary rock known as the Nemget
Formation is exposed. The formation is loaded with fossils. This is
where Roy Chapman Andrews and his crew found the world's first batch
of dinosaur eggs in 1922. Coincidently it is also where they found
the first skeleton of a relatively small horned dinosaur called
Protoceratops, followed by a many more Protoceratops skeletons.
During the course of two summers Chapman and his crew excavated more
than one hundred of these skeletons. Protoceratops is by far the most
common dinosaur in the Nemget Formation. In an extremely arid,
wind-ridden environment where fossils tend to be unusually well
preserved, Protoceratops skeletons are also usually easy to find. The
bones are white, whereas the desert rock they are lodged in is bright
red. It has been this way for countless millennia, the bones of
Protoceratops weathering out of the sandstone cliffs for anyone
passing by to see, like the nomadic peoples who inhabited the area
twenty-seven hundred years ago.
A Protoceratops skeleton could easily be mistaken for the remains of a
griffin. For one thing, the dinosaur has a very noticeable, birdlike
beak, as does the griffin. Also, there is a bar or frill that extends
from the back of the skull to the neck shield of a Protoceratops. But
the section near the shield is so thin that it usually breaks off and
disappears long before anyone finds the skull, leaving behind a
structure resembling a horn, very similar to the horn depicted in
Roman and Greek pictures of the griffin. The flared edges of the
frill could have very well been the inspiration for the griffin's long
ears. As the legend of the griffin was passed along, wings were added
to complement its' features. This makes sense because Protoceratops
has an elongated shoulder blade located in exactly the same place as
the griffin's wings.
It has been made a convincing case that the legendary griffin, which
remained part of the Greco-Roman artistic and literary traditions
until the third century AD, was inspired by the Protoceratops
skeletons of the Gobi Desert. If these ancient people had come across
a skeleton of a Protoceratops, or any other unusual skeleton, there
was every reason to believe that similar animals still existed, if not
in the immediate area, than somewhere else. There was nothing to
suggest that the skeletons of the animals they had found were all
extinct or had died out.
Works Cited
Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters. Princeton University Press.
2000.
Rudwick, M.J. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of
Paleontology. London, Macdonald. 1972. p 287.