New Mutants (1983) #53

MahmudAsrar

I don’t think a good horror movie should be cute and funny. I think it should have you laying in bed two weeks after watching it still remembering some of the sound design

I think it should make you a little nauseous too

I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.

I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.

Here’s a source:

As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.

Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesn't overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because I'm waiting for them to interrupt and they're "politely" waiting for me to finish speaking.

Okay nobody ever put that into words but the looping is exactly what I do in therapy - I should tell my therapist about this so I don’t need to say the same thing over and over again lol

deploy the boy

why does my kitty kick the back of her head like this when she has a toy? It’s like shes bunny kicking but on the back of her head lol. I don’t think its a big deal but, what is it?

Leon- looks like we are trying to bunny kick but we have yet to fully develop body awareness

Before I… crack them open?

....before you put them in here:

the water cup even comes with a little needle at the bottom for hole-poking purposes, see:

sorry i meant boil not cook

WHAT IS THAT

It's an egg cooker!

It's like a toaster and an electric kettle had a baby and ...the baby boils eggs.

#is this specifically a German thing#because Germans tend to have Opinions about eggs#also the only people I know who actually know how to use an egg cup are German#teach me your ways - I still don’t understand why you’d use an egg cup. and I can’t imagine boiling eggs not in a pot on the stove

no egg cup:

egg cup:

#why is the wobble an issue you pick them up one at a time shell then and eat them like not whole but just#you hold them and bite them and eat then till there's none left? why does this need extra tools

...at this point i'm sorry to introduce...the egg spoon.

Even better news about German egg related gadgets… the Eierköpfer (it also has a super long German name), for when you need a guillotine to open your egg neatly

No offence to Germany but why are you guys so fucking insane

nothing to see here. Just normal feelings about egg.

Ceasg, the seventieth Known One.

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

So unicorns are real

behold… a unicorn

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a

It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.

In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:

One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:

The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.

South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:

What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?

The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.

In North America there is the Piasa Bird

Which wikipedia tells me comes from “ the large Mississippian culture city of Cahokia,” it’s describes as

What fossils could have been found in that region:

Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.

Then we get our European style dragon:

One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a Cetiosaurus 

which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.

Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.

Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:

A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.

If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.

IIRC, another possible explanation for long snake-like dragons/sea serpents in Africa could’ve been Basilosaurus, a whale from the Paleogene whose skeleton looked like this: 

A lot of the most complete specimens have been found in Egypt. 

You know what, I’m tired of getting notifications for this post and not saying anything about it. I know that last time I complained about this sort of thinking, I got called out by revretch, who called me a gatekeeper and then blocked me. But I don’t have anything left to live for anymore so I’m going to let my science and education background take over for a moment and discuss this in depth.

Okay, not in depth, I’ll try to be brief.

Yes, I know tumblr likes to believe scientists are silly old fools for refusing to accept the truth that is right in front of them. Fine. Believe in what you want. But the problem is that a lot of the information in the above post is either long discredited, not taken seriously by archaeologists/folklorists for good reason, or

Animals have inspired a lot of mythical creatures. That is true.

Fossils have inspired a few mythical creatures. That is also true.

Fossils have not inspired the creatures in the above post. Not provably, at any rate, and certainly not enough for any self-respecting archaeologist to take them seriously.

Why not?

There’s a popular misconception about how fossils are formed. People tend to think they look something like in Jurassic Park 3, where a Velociraptor is being excavated in Montana (that already makes it impossible, but bear with me).

Look how nice that fossil is. It looks exactly like an animal. You can see the head, the shape of the body, the arms and legs and tail. You easily picture what it looked like alive.

This is NOT what fossils look like.

Real fossils tend to be disarticulated. Broken up. Spread over a large area. Believe me, I know! I’m a paleontology washout who’s volunteered on at least 3 digs in 3 different countries! The only information an average person could get out of most real fossils is “this was an animal”, and “this was a BIG animal”. Nobody would have deduced frills and wings and stuff like that.

The griffon hypothesis up there? We owe it to Adrienne Mayor, and it’s popular among paleontologists but not archaeologists. It makes sense on a very superficial level – It Stands To Reason, after all – but once you start looking at it in detail it breaks down. Even if, somehow, someone saw a Protoceratops skeleton in enough detail to see wings and beaks and stuff, why would they leave out the teeth? The stubby-toed feet? The ridiculous tail? Mark Witton, a person actually connected to paleontology, has done a great article on the subject.

Griffons were inspired by a number of things, including Mesopotamian royal art, and there’s at least one real animal behind the griffon (and it’s not a fossil). But that’s another story.

What about elephant-skull cyclopes? Again, it sounds like it makes sense! Certainly more so than the griffon-Protoceratops. But here we run into another problem… complete lack of proof. It sounds reasonable, but it can’t be proven. And “one-eyed giant” isn’t exactly a colossal feat of imagination - giants are one of the standard baddies in legend, and making them one-eyed makes them just more monstrous. You can just as easily argue that cyclopes originated in solar wheel imagery associated with the gods, which is why their name means “wheel-eye” and not “one-eye”, and that also ties nicely into their association with metallurgy. Again, Mark Witton has more on that.

Creatures LEGITIMATELY based on fossils typically look nothing like their progenitors, and tend to incorporate features based on their fossil location.

Mammoth remains, for instance! Those are found sticking out of eroded riverbanks, so there must have been a big animal underground! In China they are the yin shu, an enormous mouse or mole that digs underground but dies as soon as the sun touches it. (My interpretation below. Note that I couldn’t resist making it mammothy anyway)

In Siberia the witkes is a horned lake monster that demands offerings of the people who cross its water. Note that the “tusks” are seen as horns, and because the fossils are found near water, it becomes a water animal. See how the facts of the fossils become part of the legend? (Again, my interpretation below, and same comment as before)

The lindwurm of Klagenfurt was based on the discovery of a cave rhinoceros skull. Again, you can see how little the creature has to do with the fossil! People already have dragons on the brain, so finding a skull reinforces that, instead of altering it. You’ve got crocodile skulls in castles in Hungary displayed as dragon remains. Same story. Everything’s a dragon if you want it to be.

Brontotheres (thunder beasts) are named so because of the legends of the Great Plains people! Their remains were seen as the casualties of great battles, and the name honors that legend. Again, they aren’t described as being big rhino-like horned animals, just as… big animals that are now dead.

As for the others, again, those are incredible speculations that require, once again, to dismiss far more obvious things that would have inspired them. And there’s a whole lot of cultural evolution that goes on that isn’t taken into account.

The unicorn in particular. There’s no reason to think that it was anything other than the one-horned Indian rhinoceros. Elasmotherium tends to get dragged into the discussion, but all the original unicorn stories tell of a one-horned Indian monster. Not something that lives underground.

The Piasa? The above post compares it to pterosaurs, but the original did not have wings! It was a version of the “underwater panther”, a mythical underwater lynx of the Northeast Woodlands and Great Lakes regions. There’s a long story behind that but that’s, again, beyond the scope of what I wanted to say.

Of course, if you want to consider the underwater panther a dinosaur as well, be my guest.

Regarding the sauropods (and Titanoboa, and whales) inspiring giant snakes thing.

If only there was some terrifyingly large, reptilian, legless, snake-like creature in South America…

Or Africa…

Or Asia to fire people’s imagination and cause them to think of giant snakes?

And it’s not like rainbows aren’t associated worldwide with snakes because of their, well, long and thin and curvy nature.

Now if you think I’m a big horrible gatekeeping meanie for saying all this, that’s fine! There’s still a lot we don’t know, and there’s still a lot of things that could very well be based on fossils, so you can keep your hopes up!

Like the ketos of Troy, for instance!

That… looks awfully like it could be a skull! Adrienne Mayor thinks it’s a fossil Samotherium, which sounds like a stretch. It looks more like a pterosaur to me. But still, that’s something that could indeed be a fossil!

The other thing about all this is the “scientists didn’t listen to native people who told them about monsters they’d encountered”. And yes, this is true and a noble thing to believe in. But also consider that one of the reasons dinosaurs were believed to exist in “darkest Africa” (all the scare quotes) is that it was held that native people couldn’t possibly be creative enough to imagine them. Europeans talk about giant reptiles? Myths, legends, folklore. Non-Europeans talk about giant reptiles? OMG LIVING DINOSAURS. It goes both ways, sadly.

Mythical creatures are the product of culture, literature, and biology. Reducing their creation to “sees weird fossil => invents monster” is, to me, just sad, and cuts out a lot of the process and wonder and translation errors and sheer mistakes that intervene.

Paintings and Drawings by Wayne Barlowe for an unrealized project called "Cryptozoo." Barlowe hasn't revealed much about it other than that he's written a screenplay for it and has been shopping it around for years now. Personally I can't imagine how this would work as a movie, but it seems ideal for the Barlowe's Guide format...

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

So unicorns are real

behold… a unicorn

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a

It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.

In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:

One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:

The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.

South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:

What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?

The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.

In North America there is the Piasa Bird

Which wikipedia tells me comes from “ the large Mississippian culture city of Cahokia,” it’s describes as

What fossils could have been found in that region:

Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.

Then we get our European style dragon:

One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a Cetiosaurus 

which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.

Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.

Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:

A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.

If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.

@spiritspodcast

This has a similar energy to looking at the myth of the changelings, as in “the fey have stolen my baby child and replaced them with an imposter, i know that because now they act weird, they don’t mix with the other kids and make strange noises and movements”.

Because nowadays we can just say “yeah, that’s just autism actually”.

This thread is all fine and correct up until the giraffe, then a lot of minformation seeps in. The last addition regarding changelings is generally agreed upon however. According to newest research it is more likely that Elasmotherium had a short stubby horn, not even pointy. That Ice Age animal was also the size of a modern elephant, hardly the graceful elegant forest animal associated with unicorns. The animal literally called Rhinoceros unicornis would be a far more likely candidate. Humans settled in South Asia between 65000 and 80000 years ago. The last chalicothere species Hesperotherium lived 781000 years ago… in China, not South Asia. It should be obvious that those “knuckle dragging beast men” are apes of some sort, if they are based on actual creatures. The cyclops myth has nothing to do with Deinotherium, the skulls belonged to the small elephant species Palaeoloxodon falconeri. Also the photo attached does not show a Deinotherium skeleton. That’s a Gomphotherium. Protoceratops being behind the Scythian griffin is a popular trivia story since it was proposed in 1993 but that is only in relation to the Scythian griffin, no link to the Iranian griffin which dates further than that. The fact that it is present in Iranian legend is usually the strongest argument against the Protoceratops hypothesis. Dragons occur in so many cultures because they combine aspects of animals that our early ancestors had to fear and thus spark a natural fear response, which are birds of prey, big cats and snakes. From time to time dinosaur bones were interpreted as dragon bones in East Asia, longgu (dragon bones) and longchi (dragon teeth) are dinosaur fossils that were used in traditional medicine. In Europe it was usually Pleistocene mammals instead of dinosaurs. There is a dragon statue in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt that had an Ice Age rhinoceros skull used as artistic reference. The next few additions to the thread make me rather upset. Being “actually this culturally significant being that is closely tied to your religion is most likely this fossil animal” is not the progressive decolonization take you think it is. It is quite the opposite actually. It should also be noted that it is incredibly rare that almost complete, or even half complete dinosaur fossils are being found. Even less so when you aren’t actively looking for them. That’s why the first depictions of dinosaurs looked nothing like how they were depicted even a century ago. Sauropod skeletons are usually fragmentary, which is why we can’t exactly say which one the largest was. Cetiosaurus was also only found in Britain, it is not “one of the most common fossils that could have been found in Europe” and even shortly after its discovery it was thought to be a giant whale-like sea monster as opposed to the long-necked sauropod we know it as today. Sure, Spinophorosaurus, the skeleton mount in the last photo, was found with almost complete neck and tail bones, but the people who found it actively looked for the fossil and knew where to dig.

Alright, I’m going to step in again since I’m getting notifications for this post once more, and once more I feel obliged to set the record straight. Big thanks to @heckulative-evolution for pointing out the problems in the reasoning above, I’ll just add a bit more.

Please note - I don’t agree with the giraffe questing beast either. The “it was a giraffe” thing is kind of a gross oversimplification of an animal that was originally described as small, white, NOISY AS HELL, and GETS TORN APART BY ITS UNBORN OFFSPRING (THAT ARE THE ONES MAKING THE NOISE). That’s what “questing” means - “yelping” would be a better word.

Poor (literal) bastard.

Anyway, the fossil thing is a very poor explanation, because as @heckulative-evolution said, fossils tend to be fragmentary and disarticulated and offer little information besides “big dead animal”.

Griffons? Yeah, they’ve been around a long time, and no, they have nothing to do with Protoceratops. In fact, at least one prominent griffon account describes a real, recognizable animal! But a lion-eagle hybrid is a very easy one to develop artistically - the king of beasts and the king of birds. No fossils necessary.

Cyclopes? Eh, it’s debatable. But the association with metallurgy, and the fact their name means “wheel-eye”, not “one-eye”, suggests they evolved from a different cultural tradition based on solar wheels (if I recall correctly) and would have been reinforced - not created - by elephant remains.

The Piasa? Yeah, that’s an arrant hoax, blatant cultural appropriation. It’s based on the “water panther” motif, from which an entire “Native American Dragon Myth!!!” was spun out of whole cloth. Amusingly, at the time someone said it was inspired by Rhamphorhynchus (?!).

How about those dragons? Well, turns out there is “some kind of giant snake-like creature” in South America

and Africa

and Asia

that was subsequently exaggerated and mythologized into the drakōn and eventually the good ol’ dragon.

People are scared of big reptiles. That’s why a dragon in one form or another is found everywhere. Not because people are finding sauropods everywhere all willy-nilly.

And yes, the unicorn is indeed the Indian rhinoceros. The earliest accounts mention its elephantine feet too. It wasn’t until the unicorn image was contaminated with narwhal horns that the modern unicorn was born.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering. Are there any mythical creatures inspired by fossils?

Yes! But they don’t look like their fossils, and they have features inspired by their fossil nature!

One example mentioned above is the Klagenfurt lindwurm, supposedly based on a rhino skull, but the fountain in fact is older than the discovery of the skull. So that’s a no go.

But mammoth remains have inspired at least two creatures that I covered on ABC!

One is the Chinese yin-shu. It’s a giant mouse that lives underground and dies when it comes out into the sun.

Another is the Russian Mansi witkes. It’s a water monster that sheds its horns and leaves them in riverbanks.

Both of these are based on mammoth remains, but notice how neither are described as one-eyed giants? (I did have to hint at their true nature in my drawings)

- Big bones in ground = clearly a giant burrowing thing that died.

- Tusks sticking out of eroded banks = shed horns from water monsters.

See how their fossil nature is an integral part of what they are, instead of just “this looks like it could be a one-eyed giant!”

Anyway I have Strong Feelings about reducing human imagination and culture to “they saw a fossil”, but I’ll stop for now. Sorry for turning this into net zero information buuut again I felt I had to say something.

Not to be that person but if Barbie 2023 has such a shallow Feminism 101 message then why do most of the interpretations of it I see on this site miss the mark so completely

"The movie is about how either men OR women holding all the power is bad"

No. Barbie Land isn't real. There is no real world analogue to how the Kens are treated in Barbie Land because it's a world based upon toy logic. And the toy logic itself is based upon the idea that little girls living in a patriarchal society need something to inspire them to strive for roles that that very society doesn't want them to have. Barbie Land is itself a product of the same patriarchal world that Kendom is -- with the same white, American-centric, corporate, materialistic, heteronormative trappings. But it exists as a ham-fisted attempt to inspire girls to succeed in that world.

Barbie Land isn't the patriarchy reversed, it's patriarchy in absentia. It is still entirely created, defined, and reinforced in relation to how the patriarchy operates in the real world. It's still largely defined by men in suits. It's still in many ways a reinforcement of patriarchal concepts despite attempting to counter it.

The Barbies don't decide at the end to keep their world as it is because they've decided that they were Bad and Wrong for Oppressing Kens the way that the Kens rushed to oppress them the moment they thought they had permission to. They decide to keep their world as it is because it is now a world in which they are aware that the patriarchy exists where before they were blissfully ignorant.

Via swedishpiggymafia

Cryptid fish that has only been seen once and never again that may or may not exist but well never know my beloved

If you don't know the story of the Beebe's Bathysphere Fish, you owe it to yourselves to read about it. It's one of my favorite examples of cryptozoology as the actual study of animals unknown to science, as opposed to just telling stories about monsters and appropriating world folklore.

he's gonna

The X-Men have got to stop having these damn parties

Pirate all your favorite shows, movies, and games while you still have the chance.

They're buddies :3

Meet Brahk and Venom!