Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters

by Matt Kaplan

  Keen to look at this more closely, Korbonits and her team collected DNA from one of Byrne’s molars, which had been preserved for more than two hundred years in a museum. They analyzed the DNA for the possible presence of a mutant gene. Remarkably, they found something.

  In 2011, they explained in the New England Journal of Medicine that Byrne did indeed have a genetic mutation predisposing him to develop a pituitary tumor leading to his extreme height. Moreover, when they analyzed extremely tall, living patients from the region where Byrne had been born 250 years earlier, they found they also carried the mutant gene. Interestingly, some people carry the abnormal gene but never develop a pituitary tumor. Why the gene causes only some people to become giants is still unknown, but the results make it clear that giant humans have existed throughout history, and while giants themselves are often sterile and cannot give birth to more giants, their siblings who carry the gene, but who never develop the tumor, have the genetic potential to create concentrated clusters of giants by having many children.

  Yet it is crucial to recognize that real giants are sufferers of a disease. “Patients with adult or childhood-onset pituitary tumors suffer from many problems and die young if not treated. They frequently have excruciating headaches, go blind, have joint pains, develop high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems, and lung disease and almost always suffer severely from the change in their appearance and the physiological burden of this,” explains Korbonits. Fortunately, today these patients can be recognized early, partially because the genetics of their families are becoming well identified, and the tumors are destroyed before they are able to transform people. “My motto is, ‘No more giants,’ ” says Korbonits.

  So if this is possible in humans, is it possible in other animals? Nobody is really sure. The evidence so far seems to suggest not. Although giant humans are rare, they are common enough in the population for us to become aware of them, as we did with Byrne and his Irish kin. If the same condition occurred in other animals, people would notice. Veterinary scientists have documented a fair number of dogs and cats that have pituitary tumors, but these tumors all lead to the sorts of characteristics that are similar to those seen in humans who develop the tumors after puberty. Thick, folded skin and distorted skulls develop, but gigantic size does not. For a giant dog or cat to exist in this way, there would need to be puppy- or kitten-onset of the pituitary tumor and this does not seem to exist in the veterinary literature.

  Even if a giant boar could result from piglet-onset acromegaly, experts doubt that it could behave in any sort of threatening way because physiology and body mechanics change with size. Zoologist Steven Thompson at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago argues that it would be unlikely for an abnormally giant boar to be very ferocious or fast because of scaling. “The structure of joints, limbs, leverage, and tensile strength would be entirely out of whack. While an acromegaliac animal may, in principle, seem fearsome, they would be more likely to be slow and awkward,” he says.

  All science aside, there is also a more practical problem with the concept of a giant boar having ever existed. Let’s face it, if a hunter at any point in the past three thousand years picked off a boar twice the size of any other boar ever seen, the bones of that giant animal would have been preserved, put on display, and written about.11 An argument could be made that boars are too rare today and that their populations are not big enough to have the genetic diversity necessary for the appearance of a giant member of their species to be statistically likely to arise from mutation. This is a fair point, but what about other animals, like foxes, goats, and coyotes? These animals all have huge populations, yet try finding any giant versions of them in museum exhibits. There aren’t any. With such huge populations, it would be expected that at least a few giants would turn up every now and again and be displayed or sold as oddities, but they do not. Either way, the possibility of a giant mutant boar or a small population of giant mutant boars having once existed looks doubtful. Instead, Thompson suggests that if the Calydonian boar is connected to the sightings of a real animal, it would be just a very large specimen of a normal animal. “I’m thinking we could be talking about an NFL defensive lineman of the boar population, an animal that naturally reaches the upper spectrum of large size and ferocity by eating well and learning, through various encounters, to behave aggressively,” he explains.

  Regardless of how they came to exist as monsters, both the Calydonian boar and Nemean lion lost their monster status over time. The lion appears almost exclusively as a skin worn by Hercules, with the mouth forming a sort of hood over his head in later art, while the boar is always vastly outnumbered by hunters with spears. This is a pretty substantial departure from early artwork. Moreover, Renaissance portrayals of these monsters are not particularly scary, which is surprising because they easily could have been.

  During the early and mid-1500s in Europe, artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Albrecht Dürer were demonstrating a tremendous understanding of how to control light and shadow in their paintings. By the time Peter Paul Rubens painted his version of the Calydonian boar hunt in 1611, he certainly knew how to create a creepy or frightening scene if he wanted to. He had the artistic ability to put the boar in a dark forest full of shadows or have the monstrous animal charging out of a thicket hell-bent on destruction. Instead, his rendition of the hunt is brightly lit, colorful, and the boar is placed standing still in the foreground, as if waiting to be stabbed. If it were not for all the spears in everyone’s hands and the well-known mythology, viewers could have missed the fact that the painting was about a monster at all.12 Yet it is hardly surprising that such a painting was made at this time.

  The Calydonian Boar Hunt, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on panel, 59.2 x 89.7 cm., c. 1611–1612. J. Paul Getty Museum.

  During the centuries after the days of the ancient Greeks, as the human population grew, forests became better explored and animals started being properly documented. Communities sprouted up in previously unpopulated areas, and towns grew larger. The natural world became less scary, and many predators quickly became the hunted as weapons improved. If a giant boar or lion species had ever actually existed, it had to have been driven to extinction. Certainly the normal-sized European lion, which may have inspired much of the fear that fueled the Nemean lion legend by simply living near Greek communities, went extinct around 100 AD. Fewer and fewer lions and boars of any size would have been around, and as they faded from the landscape, so too did monstrous stories associated with them. But even with the passing of the Calydonian boar and Nemean lion, monstrous animals did not cease to exist. A new threat emerged in the stories of Persia and Arabia around 1300 AD: the Rukh.

  Feathery death

  Most famously described in the popular Persian folktales of Sinbad the sailor, as translated by Sir Richard Burton, the presence of the Rukh is first revealed by its egg. Sinbad, stranded on a newly discovered and seemingly uninhabited island, cannot work out what the giant white dome is when he first spots it. As he walks closer for a look, the summer day suddenly goes cool and the sky goes dark. Sinbad figures it has to be a cloud. “Methought a cloud had come over the sun, but it was the season of summer, so I marveled at this and, lifting my head, looked steadfastly at the sky, when I saw that the cloud was none other than an enormous bird, of gigantic girth and inordinately wide of wing, which as it flew through the air veiled the sun and hid it from the island.” The giant bird then comes in for a landing, settles on the dome, and begins brooding the egg.

  Sinbad, desperate to get off the island, unties his turban and uses it as a rope to hitch a ride on the Rukh when it flies off the next morning. It takes him to another island, where it first attacks and catches a large snake and then a rhinoceros. Later in his voyages, the Rukh attacks Sinbad and his fellow travelers after they have broken open its precious egg.

  Sightings of the Rukh are not limited to the tales of Sinbad. Marco Polo supposedly saw a bird so large that it could carry off an elep
hant in its talons and then drop it to its death from high above.

  There is no possibility of a bird having ever existed that could fly off with an elephant in its talons. This is not a mere matter of paleontology having failed to turn up the bones of such a beast. There is no need even to go searching for potential Rukh fossils, because the laws of physics get in the way.13 For the Rukh to have been able to have carried what people say it carried, it would have needed to have had a wingspan greater than 50 meters (264 feet). To put that in perspective, such a wingspan is as long as the largest dinosaurs (which were themselves larger than many office buildings). It is five times larger than the wingspan of the largest known flying creature, a pterosaur from the age of the dinosaurs known as Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which seems to have already been pushing the boundaries of flight physiology and is widely thought to have behaved like a vulture that ate dead dinosaurs or hunted for prey while on the ground like marabou storks rather than carry prey anywhere. The concept of such a large bird presents numerous physiological problems, like how it could have had a heart large enough to pump blood out to its wings and how its bones would not have broken under its own weight.

  So if such a monster could not have actually existed, where did the idea of a giant bird of prey come from? The largest birds alive today are the Andean condors. They are huge, with wingspans that sometimes extend as far as 10 feet (3 meters) in length. But they are docile scavengers that simply soar along the edges of canyons and over plains in search of carrion; picking up and dropping prey is not part of their repertoire. Moreover, they are found only in South America and cannot be associated with the Rukh legends, who created these tales, since the Persians and Arabians had not made it to the New World yet. There are some birds of prey that do feed on reasonably large mammals. The harpy eagle plucks monkeys out of trees, but it too lives only in South America. However, the crowned eagle in sub-Saharan Africa is well documented for behaving in a similar fashion. It feeds primarily on medium-sized mammals. And if monkeys and small antelope are on the menu, one has to ask, why not small humans?

  Modern predatory birds are perfectly capable of causing people a lot of harm. There is one particularly frightening description in the New York Times in 1895 of two boys in California being fiercely attacked by an eagle as they approached its nest. Neither died, but one was disfigured and blinded. In a similar vein, in 2008, a boy in Michigan was hospitalized after an eagle attacked when he approached its nest. However, as much as eagles can hurt people foolish enough to get too close, they are not known to actively seek out humans for food. But this might not have always been the case.

  On the South Island of New Zealand, there once was a bird of prey larger than a harpy eagle. Known as Haast’s eagle, this bird probably weighed up to 33 pounds (15 kilograms) and had a wingspan of around 10 feet (3 meters). While hardly a giant, its diet is widely thought to have consisted of the flightless birds known as moas, which were often the size of adult humans. Haast’s eagle lived on the island undisturbed until people arrived and started eating all the moas they could find. With no food to eat, the eagle went extinct. Exactly when this occurred is a mystery. Many records put its extinction date during the 1400s; others propose that it survived into the 1800s. Regardless, this was a bird capable of attacking and eating animals that were sometimes larger than humans, and it does not take much imagination to envision early islanders being killed by hungry Haast’s eagles.14

  Another recently extinct bird that may have fueled the Rukh legend is the elephant bird of Madagascar, Aepyornis, which survived until 1030. It was huge, 10 feet (3 meters) tall, but hardly threatening. It was flightless, herbivorous, defenseless, and did not survive for long once humans started inhabiting the island shortly after 500. While they probably tasted like chicken and scared nobody at all, the discovery of such large birds may have led to stories that these were the not-yet-fledged juveniles of a much larger predatory bird.

  However, when it comes to the Rukh legend, Aepyornis and Haast’s eagle present problems of timing. Madagascar was not discovered by the Europeans and Arabs until the 1500s, and New Zealand was discovered by these groups only in the 1700s, but the Rukh starts being mentioned in stories hundreds of years earlier. It seems reasonable enough that the discovery of these birds may have increased belief in a monster that was already alive in the minds of sailors, but it begs the question of where the idea for a giant bird that was flying off with elephants initially came from.

  Part of the legend of this monster undoubtedly came from people encountering fossilized dinosaur footprints. While dinosaurs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Diplodocus left footprints that could never be misinterpreted as having belonged to birds, the dinosaur group Theropoda that Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, and many other carnivores belonged to had members with feet that were distinctly birdlike. Did someone find these sorts of tracks and conclude that a giant bird once walked by? It seems plausible, but what about the idea of elephant-dropping behavior?

  In The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo wrote: “It is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure. The people of the isle call the bird Ruc.”

  What is astonishing is that this description precisely mirrors the behaviors of the bearded vulture, a bird dwelling in Africa and Asia today. It uses a tactic of grabbing the large bones of recently dead animals, flying high, and then dropping the bones onto rocky terrain below. The impact breaks the bones into pieces and allows the vultures to feed upon the juicy marrow inside.

  That the Rukh seems to have done exactly what bearded vultures were doing, but on a grander scale, hints that the formation of this monster actually required the careful observations of the natural world that ultimately played a part in driving the Calydonian boar and Nemean lion to their end.

  But why invent a Rukh at all? To answer this, it is helpful to look at what the Rukh offered that both the Calydonian boar and the Nemean lion did not. At its core, the Rukh differs from the boar and lion only in its ability to fly. Neither the boar nor the lion could contribute to the fears of ancient sailors heading off into the unexplored seas. The Rukh, on the other hand, because it had wings and could soar over oceans, remained a threat.

  In Hindu mythology, the Rukh had something of a kindhearted alter ego in the form of Garuda, a giant bird of prey that the god Vishnu rode as an aerial mount. Garuda was a champion of good and frequently depicted in the Mahabharata as hunting venomous snakes and snakelike creatures. And in modern mythology, J. R. R. Tolkien presents the giant eagles in The Lord of the Rings as allies who save the wizard Gandalf when he is imprisoned by the villainous wizard Saruman. Why such variation?

  It is impossible to know what the inventors of these benevolent beasts were thinking when they created them, but one possibility might be that regional understandings of birds and snakes differed between those dwelling in Middle Eastern settlements where the Rukh legend formed and Southeast Asian settlements where Garuda did.

  Certainly, from the perspective of snakebites, these regions show very different patterns. In 1998, a review of the morbidity and mortality of snakebites in locations around the world was published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Aside from pointing out that deaths from snakebites are a major health problem in many places, the report presents some of the best available data on where humans are most likely to get bitten by a snake, fall ill from the bite, and die.

  In India, the situation is relatively bad. The number of bites per year that actually get reported averages around 114.5 per 100,000 people, and roughly half require medical intervention to treat the spread of the venom through the body. Fortunately, due to the availability of antivenins, only 3 people per 100,000 typically die annually. In the Middle East, the situation is staggeringly different. An average of 12.5 bites are reported per 100,000 people and only 0.062 people per 100
,000 die.

  In fairness, perhaps it is not appropriate to look at current deaths from snakebites, since this could represent more of a commentary on the state of medical facilities in these two regions than on the threats actually presented by snakes, but the sheer number of snakebites being reported per year is probably a somewhat fair representation of the overall snake threat to the local population. With this in mind, it is pretty obvious that the snakes of India are a much more serious hazard than the snakes of the Middle East. And a 1954 report in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization confirms this by concluding that Southeast Asia was the fatal snakebite capital of the world at the time.

  In both regions, there are birds of prey that hunt snakes, but among locals in India, where snakes currently inflict nine times more bites per 100,000 people than they do in the Middle East, one has to wonder if seeing birds of prey killing these dangerous animals might have been viewed as something positive. Did the goodness of Garuda have to do with the serious dangers presented by snakes? Was it the snake-hunting services provided by birds in the region that led to the invention of the noble Garuda in the first place? This all seems likely.

  As for Tolkien, he was writing at a time (the 1950s) when it was well known that birds of prey attack snakes far more often than they attack people. Whether this knowledge was what guided his decision to present giant eagles as allies rather than enemies is unknown, though. What we do know is that giant animals have continued to exist as monsters all the way up to the present day.