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

by Matt Kaplan

  An end to mythic proportions?

  Many modern giant animals are not taken seriously. Indeed, in Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride, as the protagonists wander their way through the perilous fire swamp, the princess turns to her protector and asks, “Westley, what of the R.O.U.S.’s?” He responds, “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.” Westley is then, of course, promptly attacked by a giant rodent.

  This scene is not intended to frighten viewers. The giant rodent isn’t realistic, believable, or scary. When it yelps in pain, it sounds more like a Muppet than a monster. The humor in the scene stems from mockery because, to modern audiences, animals of mythic proportion seem totally absurd.

  Yet these monsters are not as extinct as they might at first seem. Giant boars and huge birds of prey may no longer feature as monsters in modern culture, but many other animals do. Consider the birds that feature in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or the spiders that are the stars in Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia.

  Here are animals that, like the Nemean lion, are tweaked in some very basic way. Hitchcock’s birds look like normal birds but behave like crazed predators, hungering for human flesh. Marshall’s spiders are different from other spiders only in that they are highly resistant to insecticides. Indeed, the really scary aspects of the monsters in these movies—the fact that the birds swarm people and that the bite of the spiders is lethal—are very much real. Birds can and do swarm people and there are spiders that have bites so lethal that they can kill people quickly.15

  Once again, study of the natural world is responsible for the birth of these monsters. The idea of birds killing by swarming or spiders wiping out an entire village with their venomous bites could have come about only as a result of people seeing such things happen in the real world. And it is precisely because these monsters are so easily accepted by educated modern audiences that they have succeeded in striking so much terror into our hearts.

  So animals still exist as monsters, but instead of scaring people with their size and strength, they now do so with natural abilities that are subtly altered by creative Hollywood minds to be more malevolent and threatening than they actually are. Yet there is, of course, one monstrous animal that is an exception. Hardly small and venomous, or even remotely in the same category as any other modern animal monsters, is the colossal ape, Kong.

  A king among the giants

  Created for the cinema in 1933 by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, Kong has since been reincarnated for King Kong movie viewers nine times. In every single film, Kong is found in a remote part of the world that has remained unexplored for one reason or another. These remote places are always home to other huge animals; in some cases these are dinosaurs, in others, they are just very large versions of common animals like snakes and lizards. The story line for each film brings humans to Kong for different reasons, but the ape always develops an emotional bond with the leading lady, nurtures and cares for her in the wilderness, and ends up being shot by aircraft while trying to protect her from harm.

  Yes, Kong is big, frightening, and lethal. In every film dozens of humans are slain by Kong’s actions, but he is not specifically revealed as malevolent as the man-eating Nemean lion or the orchard-ravaging Calydonian boar. Moreover, all of the films end with a sense of sadness over the death of the giant ape. There is no feeling of terror or fear of Kong by the end of the films, only sympathy.

  At first glance, Kong’s story seems the same as that of other monstrous animals. Like the Nemean lion, he is a monstrous animal from unexplored wilderness wreaking havoc on civilization. But Kong is different from these monsters of Greece. Ancient monstrous animals are not natural. They are the products of the gods and are sent to Earth to create pain and suffering. The Rukh, on the other hand, is not brought to the world by gods but discovered by humans; it just attacks those who tamper with its eggs. The spiders in Arachnophobia are dangerous animals from the deep jungle that are accidentally brought by humans back to civilization. Kong also is a dangerous natural animal brought from the wilderness to civilization but he is intentionally brought back for profit. Really, Kong’s story is a morality tale about the consequences of exploiting the natural world, raising the question of whether it would have been better to have just left Kong alone.

  Most intriguingly, Kong is distinctly a “he,” and that cannot just be dismissed. It indicates a key difference in the way audiences identify with the monster. None of the other giant animal monsters are ever described by gender. By being given gender, Kong is, in a way, brought one step closer to humanity and made less of a monster. In our quest to understand what monsters say about human fears through the ages, such a dramatic difference between the most famous modern giant animal monster and ancient monsters of the same type is intriguing. Why the decision to make the men in the story so insensitive and cruel? Is there something in society that we now fear more than the jungle?

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  4 Until the lunatic owner of an exotic-animal farm in Ohio housing eighteen Bengal tigers, seventeen lions, and numerous other carnivores opens up all of his enclosures to the outside world and then shoots himself in the head.

  5 When you are the goddess of the hunt, I guess you end up with some pretty exotic pets.

  6 In 2011, a wonderful little article in the academic journal Biotropica suggested that a solution to Greece’s financial problems might involve reforesting large swaths of land and reintroducing lions to the landscape to encourage ecotourism. While no action on this matter has yet been taken by the Greek government, they might be wise to look beyond ecotourism and consider connecting such conservation actions toward their long and well-known mythical traditions. “Come to Nemea and see the legendary lion that battled Hercules!”

  7 Not to mention unbelievably fierce, since stabbing, but not killing, many large predators can just send them into a furious rage.

  8 The skull of an elephant has a large space in the center where the muscles for the trunk attach. However, trunks are made up of soft tissues that rot away after death. To those without a background in paleontology (a description that pretty much applied to all of the ancient Greeks), such skulls look like they have one giant eye in the center. Moreover, the presence of tusks adds the impression that the Cyclops has fangs.

  9 It is also possible that hunters went out to kill a lion, failed, nearly got eaten in the process, and just made up the story of the lion being invulnerable to save face. Adrenaline makes men do and say the stupidest things.

  10 In 2004, a boar was shot and killed in Alabama that was initially claimed by the hunter to be 12 feet (3.6 meters) long and to weigh more than 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms). This was more than twice the length and weight of the wild boars known to be roaming the U.S. wilderness, so a team of researchers funded by the National Geographic Society went to check out the grave of this creature that locals were calling “Hogzilla.” As mentioned earlier, the adrenaline of the hunt leads to mistaken perceptions, and the hunter was—no surprise—proved to have exaggerated the animal’s size. When the researchers dug up the animal, they found the boar to be only 7 feet (2 meters) long and weighing in at 800 pounds (360 kilograms). That’s a big boar, but still very close to the upper range of natural wild boars. Hogzilla was thus something of a hoax.

  11 Tabloids… not a modern invention.

  12 And named it something ridiculous like Picnic with Boar.

  13 The physics supporting all of this is a chore, but if we work with the assumption that, like eagles, the Rukh could lift half its own body weight into the air to fly off with a 4,500-kilogram elephant, the bird would be around 9,000 kilograms, and the combined bird plus elephant payload would be 13,500 kilograms. Classic lift theory states that: Lift = 1/2(þ • v2) • S • Cl, where þ is the air density (1.18 kg/m3), v is the velocity (say, 9 m/s), S is the projected area (m2), and Cl is the dimensionless lift coefficient (say, 1.15, based on measurements for a vulture). This means the bird would need a wing area of 245 m2 to s
tay aloft carrying an elephant. In aerodynamics, the aspect ratio of a wing is essentially the ratio of its length to its breadth, a measurement called the chord. A high aspect ratio indicates long, narrow wings, whereas a low aspect ratio indicates short, stubby wings. For most wings, the length of the chord is not a constant but varies along the wing, so the aspect ratio AR is defined as the square of the wingspan b divided by the area S of the wing platform. This is equal to the length-to-breadth ratio for constant breadth:

  Bird aspect ratios can vary from 1.5 to around 18, so let us assume something around 10. Therefore, a 245 m2 wing area would mean the Rukh would need a wingspan of around 50 meters. Of course, there is a problem here, because this applies only to a Rukh that is already in flight. To behave as legends say it did, with such a “small” wing-span it would need to swoop down at high speed, grab an elephant, and fly off without losing momentum. If the bird were to stop, kill the elephant, and then try to get lift again with the elephant in tow, such wings would not have worked at all. If you want to understand the physics of that sort of behavior, get a degree in aeronautical engineering.

  14 For years, archaeologists assumed that punctures found in the skulls of early human ancestors, like some of the australopithecines living 3.5 million years ago, were made by the fangs of great cats, but in 2006 a team of a researchers published evidence in the Physical Journal of Anthropology revealing that these punctures were nearly identical to punctures that large eagles make with their beaks and talons when they kill monkeys today. This led the team to argue that birds of prey were playing a big part in hunting our forebears. Such finds also raise the question of whether we might have some instinctive fear of large raptors buried deep within our genes.

  15 Seagulls can be downright vicious. Accidentally wandering into their nesting sites will almost always lead to a flurry of feathers, shrieks, mobbing, and pecking. Moreover, a study published in Nature Geoscience in 2011 found a period of bizarre seabird behavior in 1961 when seagulls frequently slammed themselves into beach homes and cars (widely thought to have inspired Hitchcock’s film), which came about as a result of the birds suffering nerve damage after being exposed to neurotoxins released by a toxic algae bloom off the coast of California.

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  Beastly Blends—Chimera, Griffon, Cockatrice, Sphinx

  “These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes.”

  —Dr. Moreau, The Island of Dr. Moreau

  Not far removed from the realm of the Nemean lion, Calydonian boar, and Rukh are monstrous animals not of unusual size but of unusual form. Seemingly inspired by ancient people dwelling in a drug-induced haze, many of these monsters are bizarre anatomical blends that have been unbelievably stitched together. Multiple heads, duplicated limbs, bodies combining wings and claws, and tails with teeth, these monsters proved common throughout most of ancient and medieval history.

  Among the most notable are the Manticore of Persian myth, a beast that had the head of a human, the body of a lion, and a tail covered in venomous spikes that it could launch at its foes like arrows. There were also the many-headed monsters, like the reptilian Hydra that battled Hercules, and the three-headed hound Cerberus who guarded the gates of Hades. And some blends just mixed and matched animal traits without any sort of logic, like the Griffin, which had the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, and the Cockatrice, which was part rooster and part dragon. Yet few beastly blends are as well known today as Chimera of Lycia.

  First mentioned in Homer’s Iliad, Chimera is described as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle.” As if being part lion and part goat with a snake for a tail were not disturbing enough, Homer added that it had the ability to breathe a “terrible flame of bright fire” as well.

  Some descriptions were far bolder. Hesiod suggested in his Theogony that Chimera had multiple heads, one of a “grim-eyed lion,” another of a goat, and a third of a serpent, which some translations describe as a dragon. As for its body, its front portion was leonine, the hind portion reptilian, and the torso goatlike. Hesiod, like Homer, suggests that the monster was capable of breathing fire, but contrary to what modern audiences might expect, it is the goat rather than the dragon head that seems to have done the fire breathing.

  Chimera of Arezzo. Bronze, Etruscan, c. 400 BC. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence. Art Resource, NY.

  Ancient artists went wild with Chimera. Some portrayed it as Homer described, with a snake for a tail, a goat’s torso, and a lion head with lion forelimbs, while others followed Hesiod’s description, placing three heads on the front of the beast, with lion forelimbs, reptilian hind limbs, and, occasionally, dragonlike wings sticking out from its back. Some artistic representations of the monster fall in between the two, portraying a beast with a goat head awkwardly stuck out of the creature’s spine with reptilian and leonine traits mingled throughout the rest of the body.

  Yet as often as Chimera appears in Greek art and literature, the fears that it represented are not as straightforward as those presented by the merely monstrous animals discussed earlier. It seems logical that Chimera partially stood for the unknown dangers beyond civilized lands since it was said to dwell in the land of Lycia, around 500 miles east of Athens, in what today is southeastern Turkey. Even so, the dangers posed by wild beasts were well presented in more mundane monsters like the Nemean lion and Calydonian boar. Chimera had much more to it, but why? What was it that drove people to fear a fire-breathing creature with such a blend of unusual animal traits?

  Morphological mess

  It is a challenge to conceive of the possibility that Chimera’s creation was the result of a misinterpreted animal encounter. It just does not make sense. Female lions work in groups to attack prey at night, so it would not be unlikely for a survivor to come away claiming to have been attacked by a lion with multiple heads. But with a snake for a tail?

  Snakes are not known for teamwork, even within their own species, and the idea of a snake being associated with a lion attack is hard to believe. It is conceivable that a poor soul might have been ambushed by both a viper and a lion at the same time during some unlucky evening. But it is a stretch to conceive that this was common enough to create a myth.

  And then there is the goat. Who came up with this? Goats are eaten by lions.16 There is no getting around it: The concept of an animal encounter creating Chimera just doesn’t make sense. So if the idea of ecology inspiring Chimera is illogical, could there have been something biological behind it? Like other animal-inspired monsters, it is worth considering whether a mutant of some sort was born that the ancients viewed as a monster.

  Animals can sometimes be born with the traits of other animals on their bodies. Horses, which normally have just one toe, can be born with multiple toes, dolphins can be born with legs, and humans can be born with tails. These mutations happen when very old genes, which have been inactive in an animal for years, for reasons not entirely understood suddenly become expressed instead of the genes that normally should. Called atavisms, these genetic mutations can create chimeric-looking organisms.

  But atavisms are not totally random in what they do. They do not simply grant a random trait. Humans are not born with wings and snakes are not born with fur. Instead, they produce traits that existed in the evolutionary past of that animal. Think about it: Human ancestors had tails, horse ancestors had multiple toes, dolphin ancestors had limbs. Odd as it is, there is a logic to the mutation.

  Yet Chimera does not show characteristics of lion ancestors mixed with those of a lion; it has characteristics of a goat and snake. This is not helpful. If the lion were the base animal that an atavism were taking place in, the lion could be born with a weasel-like face and shorter limbs because the evolutionary lineage that eventually led to lions contained a lot of weasel-like predators. But it would not be possible for a lion to be born with any snakelike traits because lions did not evolve f
rom snakes or their relatives. The same is true of goats. Lions and goats are actually relatively closely related, but traits that are identifiably goatlike, like a goat head with horns, appear in the goat evolutionary lineage long after it breaks away from the evolutionary lineage leading to lions.

  Even if the evolutionary pathways were different and the lion’s ancestry did stem from a lineage that had given rise to goats and snakes, it is hard to imagine a mutant carrying all of these traits surviving birth, let alone its first few months of life, with the sorts of deformities that would have been required for Chimera to have existed. For these reasons it is impossible for an animal looking like Chimera to have ever been born.

  Yet the basic ideas upon which Chimera is founded are not, on their own, totally ridiculous. Take, for example, Hesiod’s description of the beast having multiple heads. Animals can have two or more heads when twins or triplets develop abnormally in the womb.

  Under normal circumstances, an embryo forms from a sperm and an egg. But sometimes, shortly after fertilization, the cluster of cells destined to become the embryo spontaneously splits into two fully functional clusters of cells that go on to become two embryos. This results in identical twins. However, it is speculated that sometimes the two clusters of cells do not entirely break away from one another or that after breaking away they partially reconnect. The result, if the twins survive to birth, is conjoined twins.

  Among humans, such individuals’ lives can be medically challenging, as two brains are often forced to share vital organs like stomachs and hearts. For animals, survival is unlikely, since obtaining food requires finely tuned senses and considerable coordination. Two brains trying to control a single body makes coordination difficult, and animals with two heads are rarely seen surviving to adulthood in the wild. Even so, two-headed and even three-headed animals17 can exist and might have inspired the creation of Chimera and other beastly blends like Hydra and Cerberus.