Stories of mythical creatures are never in short supply. According to common folklore, most have ridiculous features and characteristics that may make it impossible to believe in their existence. The fact that we often lack verifiable evidence to prove they are real does not make their situation any better.
However, as we are about to find out, many of these supposedly mythical creatures actually existed and some are still around today. Now, you may be thinking, if they are really around, why do we not have pictures? We actually do. It is just that we mistake them for some other creature.
10- Mermaids
Tales of mermaids, a race of half-human and half-fish hybrids that live in the
ocean are a common sailor’s tale.
Surprisingly, many of those
stories are actually real even though they may be exaggerated. Mermaids exist.
Christopher Columbus even spotted three during his first trip to America. He
described them as “not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had
some masculine traits”.
Wait, what? Masculine? But
mermaids are almost always female, aren’t they?
Well, the creatures we call
mermaids are actually manatees and their closely related cousins, dugongs. Both
animals are called sea cows because of their huge size. They are the largest
aquatic herbivores in the world. Sailors mistook them for mermaids because of
their unique human and fish-like characteristics.
A fully-grown sea cow is about
six feet long, which is around the height of an adult human. They have five
human finger-like bones on their flippers and can turn their necks and stand in
shallow waters like a human. Put in their fish-like rears that sometimes stick
out of the water and you have a mermaid.
9Kraken
The kraken is probably the most fearsome sea monster ever imagined. According
to sailors of old, it is a huge, octopus-like creature with a fondness for
sinking ships and eating its crew. Legend says the kraken attacked and sank
ships with its strong arms. If it was unsuccessful, it started swimming in
circles until it created a whirlpool that sunk the ship.
Is the kraken real? Yes, it is.
The so-called kraken is actually
the giant squid, which is huge (as the “giant” in the name already hints) but
considerably smaller and less violent than sailors claimed. There are no
accounts that it ever attacked or sank a ship or is even powerful enough to
sink one.
The kraken moved from folklore to
reality when the remains of a giant squid was found on a shore in Denmark in
1853. Curiously, the giant squid is as elusive as the legend it inspired. It
lives so deep underwater that we have limited information about it.
However, we know it has the
largest eyes of all living creatures, grows up to 18 meters and is frequently
hunted by sperm whales for food. The weaker giant squid generally flees when
confronted by a whale. However, it sometimes fights back when cornered and it
is not unusual to find sperm whales with scars left from their battles with
giant squids.
8Dragons
Dragons are probably the most common mythical creatures out there. Their looks
vary but the most common descriptions indicate they had reptile-like bodies,
bat-like wings and sharp claws. Lest we forget, they also breathed fire out of
their mouths.
Why do dragons have such varied
description and why do many unrelated cultures attest to their existence?
It is because the real dragons
had varied looks and lived in different parts of the world. Long after they
were gone, their remains turned into fossils, which natives found and used to
describe what they looked like. Some were huge and others were not. Some had
sharp claws, some had bat-like wings and some may have had reptile-like bodies.
However, none breathed fire from their mouths.
Lastly, we do not call them
dragons but dinosaurs. Yes, dinosaurs are the origin of the dragon myth. Many
cultures, particularly ancient China where tales of dragons abound, came up
with dragons after finding fossils of dinosaurs.
7Pouakai
Maori folklore tells of the existence of a giant flying bird with a fondness
for snatching humans off the ground and carrying them away for consumption.
They called the bird pouakai, which means “old glutton” in English. As
Frederick Richardson Fuller, a taxidermist at Canterbury museum later found out
in 1871, that bird really existed.
The haast eagle, as it is now
known, was the largest eagle to ever roam the earth. Its wings alone reached
three meters and its primary prey was the larger (and extinct) moa bird, which
weighed between 100 and 250 kilograms. We humans weigh considerably less, so
the bird may have really hunted us.
The haast eagle and moa evolved
independently of humans. This means the eagle may have confused the first
humans to land on New Zealand with the moa since the humans probably wore
clothes made out of feathers. On the other hand, it may not have cared at all
and just added us to the menu.
6Roc
If you thought the haast eagle was deadly, the roc is worse. It is a haast
eagle on steroids. If a haast eagle could pick up a human, a roc would pick up
a community. No one said it did but we are just trying to provide some
perspective. However, there are claims the roc could lift a fully-grown
elephant off the ground.
Sailors of old claimed the roc
lived on an island just off the coast of Africa. In reality, the supposed roc
is actually the aepyornis aka the elephant bird. It weighed half a ton and grew
up to 10 feet, making it the largest bird to ever exist. Like the roc, it lived
on Madagascar, an island just off the coast of Africa.
However, the aepyornis could not
lift an elephant into the sky because it was flightless. Besides, there are no
elephants in Madagascar and the bird, despite its huge size, is much smaller
than an elephant. The elephant bird existed at the time rumors of the roc first
appeared 900 years ago but went extinct in the 1500s. Humans may have hunted it
into extinction.
10 REAL-LIFE INSPIRATIONS FOR MYTHICAL THINGS
5Unicorns
The unicorn is a mythical horse with a single horn in the middle of its head.
Are they real? Yes, they were but they were not what you think.
Unicorns were not horses but rhinoceroses,
that is, if the extinct Siberian unicorn is really the origin of the unicorn
myth. Like the unicorn it may have inspired, the Siberian unicorn walked on
four legs and had a huge horn in the middle of its head.
However, unlike the unicorn, the
rhino was bigger, stronger and probably meaner. For perspective, it weighed
four tons. You would not want to be around that thing.
The Siberian unicorn lived in
Eurasia until it went extinct around 39,000 years ago. Fortunately for the
humans that were around at the time, it was a herbivore and preferred munching
down on shrubs. However, like today’s rhinos, it may have been very aggressive
towards unlucky humans that strayed too close.
4Griffins
The griffin is another hybrid mythical creature. According to myth, they have
the faces, wings and front legs of an eagle and the rear, tail and hind legs of
a lion. They flew too, which makes them one creature early humans would have
given a wide berth, if they existed that is.
Talking of existence, griffins
really existed but that was before the first humans appeared. They were
actually a kind of dinosaur called the protoceratops. Like the griffin, the
protoceratops walked on four legs and had a beak but did not have a wing.
But at a time when people had
little knowledge of dinosaurs and only birds were believed to have beaks, it is
no surprise that people claimed it had wings. Whatever had a beak should have a
wing, shouldn’t it? Besides, the creature had long shoulder blades that were
easily mistaken for wings.
3Sea
serpent
The sea serpent is another ferocious creature believed to patrol the ocean.
Seafarers of old told elaborate stories of its existence so much that it became
folklore. The creature, as you may have guessed from its name, is a supposedly
monstrous fish-snake hybrid. Like the kraken, the sea serpent really exists
even though its features and stories are heavily exaggerated.
For a start, the supposed sea
serpent is actually an oarfish, which really looks like a fish-snake hybrid.
But that is where their similarities end. The oarfish is much smaller even
though it is considerably long for a fish. It reaches up to 30 feet in length,
making it the longest bony fish in existence.
Unfortunately, we know little
about the oarfish because it lives deep underwater. However, we know it neither
feeds on humans nor fishes but on small marine creatures like crustaceans and
krill. It was officially discovered in 1772, centuries after the legend it
inspired first appeared.
2Yeti
The Himalaya people of Nepal and China have traditionally talked about the
existence of a big and hairy six-foot tall creature they call the Yeti. The
existence of this mythical and elusive creature only became widespread
knowledge in 1921 when some British explorers claimed to have found its
footprints while climbing the Everest.
The explorers said their local
guides called them “metoh-kangmi” (“man-bear snow-man”). However, Henry Newman,
the journalist who interviewed the group, mistranslated “metoh” as “filthy”
instead of “man-bear”. He later changed filthy to abominable because it sounded
better. That was how the Yeti got its more common name, the Abominable snowman.
The name, the Abominable snowman,
may make you mistake the Yeti for a race of undiscovered and uncivilized humans.
However, if we went back to its correct Himalaya name, the “man-bear snow-man”,
we would quickly realize we are dealing with a human-sized bear that lives in
the snowy region.
The Yeti is actually the
Himalayan brown and black bears, two real subspecies of bears that live in the
Himalayas. Like the Yeti, both bears are big, hairy and brown (or black in the
case of the black bear). DNA tests have proven that most of the hair, skin,
teeth, fur and feces that supposedly belong to the Yeti actually belong to
these bears.
1Gorillai
Sometime between the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., an explorer from ancient
Carthage called Hanno the Navigator discovered a tribe of hairy and “rude
people” while navigating the coasts of West Africa. In his reports, Hanno wrote
that the tribe had more males than females who he referred to as “hairy women”
and called gorillai.
Hanno’s party chased the tribe
but they all fled. The males were considerably faster and quickly climbed the
cliffs from where they threw stones at his team. The females were slower and
his team managed to capture three. However, they fought back aggressively,
forcing Hanno and his men to kill and skin them. He took their skins back to
Carthage.
The creatures became folklore
since no westerner saw them again until an American missionary called T.S.
Savage, rediscovered them in 1847. They were not humans but apes. Or to be more
precise, they are the apes we now call gorillas. Savage named the new creatures
“Troglodytes gorilla” in keeping with Hanno’s gorillai.
To be clear, there is some debate
over whether Hanno saw gorillas or some other species of apes. Nonetheless,
Savage’s “Troglodytes gorilla” was later renamed “Gorilla gorilla” while the
animal itself was called gorilla.
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