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View all animal worksheets. View all Addition Worksheets. View all Numbers Worksheets. View all Money Worksheets. Click the button below to get instant access to these worksheets for use in the classroom or at a home. This download is exclusively for KidsKonnect Premium members! For example, the griffin has the body parts of a lion but the face and wings of an eagle. And so on. Whatever the particular form the monster may have taken within a specific geographical area, its essential features would clearly have identified it as a very dangerous creature even to those unfamiliar with local fauna.
Monsters were used as a means of imbuing sacred or dangerous geographical areas with taboo and explaining the source and cause of lethal natural disasters, such as typhoons, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and so on. But the basic function of the monster was to give fear a face, to graphically capture the dread that is bred into us by millions of years as a prey species that was stalked and sometimes eaten by huge and terrifying carnivores.
This same claim is made today by some cryptozoologists. Another fertile source of mythic monsters is the bone yard. The reptilian or serpentine characteristics given to many mythic monsters may reflect the fact that fossilized skeletons, often reduced to an undulating backbone and neck, look like a snake. No one has done more to illuminate the relationship between fossils and mythmaking than Adrienne Mayor, who has documented hundreds of instances during the last two thousand five hundred years when fossil bones provided the scaffolding for elaborate mythmaking, as frightened people sought to give meaning to the startling animal remains they happened across.
To cite just one example, the Thunder Bird of Native American mythology may have something to do with discoveries of Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons.
The mythologizing process probably did not start with the Greeks and Romans or even with the appearance of the modern brain. Homo erectus also must have tried to explain the frightful skulls and bones it came across.
In fact, the hyper predator detection system of early humans would have prompted them to interpret the bones as the remains of creatures still alive and possibly lurking somewhere in the environment. The tens of millions of bones that accumulated ever since the first skeletal creatures swam in the sea provided our forebears with constant provocations to imagine the existence of monstrous predators.
Monsters were also created by dreams and reveries. The memories of these experiences were not stored as accurate snapshots but as somewhat distorted versions of that experience, reshaped, exaggerated, or diminished according to their emotional content. But periodic escape, during rituals, would have been therapeutic, helping assuage fear and increase confidence. These fear-management strategies, however, had ironic consequences. Among the salient experiences our ancient ancestors remembered and stored in their unconscious must have been life-threatening encounters with predators.
Which means that during altered states, images of predators would have undergone further shaping, twisting, recombination, or hybridization. The upshot is that proto-humans were able to conjure up hybrid images of animals well before cognitive fluidity and mythmaking emerged during the Middle Paleolithic. Although proto-humans could not spin yarns about monsters, they may have been able to imagine them, and thus unintentionally add to their fears through the same processes they were using to escape their fears.
The beasts ripped flesh with their razor sharp talons, and they were also known to fly their victims to great heights before dropping them to their deaths. According to researcher Adrienne Mayor, legends of the griffin could be inspired by early encounters with dinosaur fossils.
Scythian nomads in central Asia may have stumbled across the bones of the dinosaur protoceratops and mistook them for a bird-like creature, resulting in the myth of a terrifying flying beast.
One of the most forbidding of all mythical creatures, the manticore was a bloodthirsty quadruped that supposedly sported the head of a blue-eyed man, the auburn body of a lion and the stinging tail of a scorpion. The legend of this deadly hybrid first began with Greek authors such as Ctesias, who chronicled it in a book about India.
Ctesias and others described the manticore as having three rows of teeth like a shark and a tuneful bellow that sounded like a trumpet. Most terrifying of all, it had an insatiable appetite for human flesh. After using its blistering speed to chase down its prey, the beast was said to slash at them with its claws or sting them with its tail before devouring them bones and all.
Pliny described the basilisk as a snake-like animal with markings on its head that resembled a crown, but by the Middle Ages it had morphed into a fiendish serpent with the head of a rooster and the wings of a dragon or bat.
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