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

by Matt Kaplan

  The idea of having limbs that differ from one another in size and shape is not preposterous either. It is perfectly reasonable for an animal to be born, as the result of mutation, with hind limbs that are shorter than the forelimbs or are deformed and thus different-looking from the rest of the body. Again, these sorts of mutations would make life very hard, and survival to adulthood would be extremely unlikely. Although it is (just barely) feasible that a multiheaded lion with deformed hind limbs that were mistaken for goat legs could have existed, the poor beast would not have been able to hunt.18

  No, mutation seems as unlikely an explanation for the origin of Chimera as a multiple-animal ambush in the woods. But there is another possibility: fossils.

  Sticky situation

  In The First Fossil Hunters, Adrienne Mayor makes a persuasive argument that the half-eagle, half-lion monster known as the Griffin came about when ancient people discovered the bones of the dinosaur Protoceratops and tried to imagine what the animal would have looked like when alive. The idea is entirely logical—Protoceratops had a beak but was clearly something quite different from a bird. Moreover, Protoceratops, like many of the other members of the dinosaur group to which it belonged, like the iconic Triceratops, had a bony frill rising up from the back of its neck. This frill is thought by some paleontologists to have played a role in protecting the cervical vertebrae just behind the dinosaur’s skull. It is not unlikely that the first people who looked upon this fossil identified the bones of the frill as having been some sort of wing, particularly in light of the fact that there was a beak on the business end of the beast.

  The Griffin is not alone in potentially being explained by observations of early fossils. The Cockatrice, which appears in much medieval literature and art, is presented as something of a malevolent chicken blended with reptilian or draconic features that could kill with its gaze or petrify with a touch of its toothy beak. Although a deadly petrifying gaze is one of the characteristics associated with Medusa, the morphology of the monster is strikingly similar to many fossils dug up in China during the past decade that walk the fine line between being somewhat like modern birds and somewhat like the aggressive predatory Velociraptor featured in Jurassic Park. The first creature of this sort uncovered by modern paleontologists was an Archaeopteryx found in Germany a little over 150 years ago. The existence of the Cockatrice in historic literature and art raises the question of whether somebody somewhere stumbled upon a similar fossil a long time earlier. With such remarkable similarities between the fossil and the Cockatrice, the possibility seems likely. But even so, individual fossils encased in rocks go only so far in explaining monsters that mix various animal traits. It is hard to think of a single extinct species that could explain Chimera, but there are still some possibilities if the fossilization process itself is taken into consideration.

  One type of fossilization process that can occur is a catastrophic flood. In desert regions, when parched land is suddenly exposed to intense thunderstorms, a flash flood can result. The rushing water often sweeps away animals in its path. Floodwaters frequently are so violent that the creatures they carry away die, and then, as the flow slows or as the rushing water turns a bend, the corpses of the animals are deposited. It is conceivable that a goat, a lion, and a snake were all killed, dumped in a mangled pile, and then covered up by sediment carried by the remaining waters from the storm. These jumbled bones would be difficult to make sense of and could have been interpreted as having been the bones of a single fantastic monster. Similarly, several wolves killed and dumped by raging waters in a single location could have led to ideas surrounding the multiheaded Cerberus, and several large reptiles captured in this way could have inspired the myth of the Hydra. Yet there is another option.

  Most corpses get buried and transformed into fossils in places like lake beds and stream banks where sediment can quickly pile up on top of the corpse shortly after its death. The speed with which this happens is important, because the longer it takes to cover up a corpse with sediment, the greater the chances that a scavenger will come along, tear up the body, and scatter the bones so they are not buried. In general, animal interactions with corpses are bad for potential fossil formation, but there is one very significant exception to this.19

  In places where petroleum naturally bubbles up to Earth’s surface, pools of tar can form. No sensible animal will go near these pools, since tar is both sticky and smelly, but the thing about tar pits is that they can sometimes get covered up and appear benign. Shortly after a rainstorm, water can flow into tar pits and cover the tar, making it look like a lake. “Alternatively, in some areas dust and dirt can blow over tar pools, plants can begin to grow over the gloopy tar, and this can entice animals near,” explains paleontologist Michael Benton at the University of Bristol. In the days or weeks after water has accumulated or plants have grown, a thirsty or hungry animal might wander down and step into the tar. While trying to free itself, the animal only becomes more hopelessly stuck and sinks deeper into the quagmire. It shrieks in panic as it slides inevitably toward its death, but its cries bring the attention only of predators keen to take advantage of what they think is a wounded animal.

  With the first animal trapped in the tar just a short jump from the shore, a predator leaps in to take advantage of what looks like easy prey. The predator might get one or two good bites before also becoming stuck. The predator’s attacks turn to wails of frustration and terror as it too slides toward its demise. These cries attract more predators, and the scenario continues. Ultimately, a pile of animals forms, some dead, some still alive, and the chaos, along with the scent of dead meat, attracts vultures that come in for a nibble. Some land, feed, and get away, while others land, get stuck, and die. Eventually, the process ends when the entire mangled and smelly mess sinks below the tar.

  Aside from being pretty effective at capturing animals, tar is very good at preserving bones as it solidifies over the years into black rock. True, the bones stink of petroleum and have a nasty yellow look to them, but they are otherwise in perfect condition.20 The only catch is that sorting out the fossils that result from the scavenger/predator/prey chaos is something of a paleontological nightmare. Bones from the original thirsty animal get mingled with those of the predators, and bones from predators get mingled with those of scavengers. It can take thousands of hours to pick apart the fossils left behind and work out how many animals there were and what sorts of relationships they had with one another.

  With tar pits and their processes firmly in mind, consider the following story. A thirsty goat wanders down to a quiet lake. This watering hole does not appear to be staked out by predators as so many other watering holes are, and the goat steps into the shallows for a quick drink. Suddenly, it finds that it cannot pull its legs back out of the lake. Indeed, the reason the watering hole is not staked out by predators is because it is not a watering hole at all, but a tar pit. The goat gets thoroughly stuck as it struggles to get out, and its screams attract a lion. The lion pounces on the goat and gets stuck as well. Both the lion and the goat die, but before they sink beneath the tar, vultures come in to feed. These vultures, because of their light weight, do not get stuck, but their presence attracts a bird-hunting viper that slithers over the edges of the tar pit without any trouble but gets stuck in the recently churned-up tar where the lion and goat died. All three, the goat, the lion, and the snake, slowly slide into the tar together, get preserved, and their bones are ultimately found in stinky blackened rock by people who can only wonder at what sort of creature would have left such a skeleton behind.

  And Chimera was hardly alone. If a horse went down to a tar pit for a bit of water, got stuck, died, and was subsequently fed upon by a vulture that also got stuck in the tar, that would provide an explanation for the legendary Pegasus. Some art even shows Chimera battling with Pegasus. Was this linked to a find of fossils that people could barely make sense of?

  Chimera Versus Pegasus, attributed to Heidelberg painter. Greek c
up, c. 560–550 BC. Louvre Museum, Paris. Art Resource, NY.

  The Sphinx could have also had her origin here.21 With the body of a lion, the head of a human, and the wings of an eagle, it is reasonable to propose that a human or an ancestor of modern humans like Homo erectus went down to a water-covered tar pit for a drink, got stuck, was attacked by a lion, and then the dying lion was feasted upon by an eagle. All got trapped and were preserved together. This, of course, raises the question of whether humans or their ancestors were stupid enough to go down to a tar pit thinking it was a safe place to get water or collect plants. When visiting tar pits today, even disguised ones, the scent of petroleum is always thick in the air and the area seems “not quite right.” But perhaps it took years of trial and error for the lesson to take hold, since fossils of humans and their ancestors do, very occasionally, turn up in tar pit fossil sites.

  Among the ancient monsters that tar pits best explain is Scylla. First extensively mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, Scylla lived on one side of a narrow channel opposite a monstrous whirlpool known as Charybdis that ate ships for breakfast (more on Charybdis in “The Mysterious Fathoms”). Odysseus had to sail through this channel and was forced to decide whether he would sail within reach of Charybdis or within reach of Scylla.

  Chimera’s complex anatomy pales in comparison to Scylla’s. She had four eyes, six heads that each had three rows of sharp teeth, twelve legs, a feline tail, and numerous wolf or dog heads attached to her waist. Intriguingly, while Scylla is well known from later Greek art and stories to have had the upper body of a female human, her earliest depiction, on an Etruscan cylindrical ivory box covered in reliefs from 600 BC, is not human at all. The monster has multiple wolf or dog heads sticking out from several serpentine necks. Indeed, if there is a monster that stands as evidence that the ancients were looking at fossils of multiple animal skeletons jumbled together, it is Scylla.

  However, this requires tar pits, and Greece (and the rest of Europe) doesn’t have any. In the heart of Los Angeles, thousands of predator fossils have been dug up. Indeed, a museum at the site has a wall of wolf skulls beautifully arranged to drive home the point that this site was a very effective predator trap. Yet the La Brea Tar Pits would have been entirely unknown to the Greeks, who knew nothing of the New World.

  The reason California has a lot of tar pits is because tar and oil tend to go hand in hand. Where there is oil, tar is often not far off. Not surprisingly, tar deposits are found in Russia, a major modern oil producer, and in the Middle East, which also has lots of oil. So it might not have been the Greeks in Greece who initially conjured up Chimera, but rather, Greeks living in colonies along the eastern coast of the Black Sea (now Russia) or along the eastern and southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where some oil reserves are located not far from the Syrian coast. Trade routes certainly ran from these colonies to Greece, and the tales of strange fossils may have spread along these routes.

  It is possible that the idea behind a monster like Chimera goes even farther back, to the Kingdom of Israel between 1010 and 930 BC, when Israelites ruled the land near the inland Syrian oil fields of Tadmur. These people, or even an earlier civilization, may have seen mixed and mangled bones and come up with the ideas that ultimately coalesced into Chimera. Regardless of where and when the monster was first imagined, it is not hard to envision the discoverers of a tar pit fossil spreading word of a terrible creature with a goat’s body, a lion’s head, and a snake for a tail.

  The possibility of Chimera having arisen in the eastern Mediterranean is further supported by Homer, who specifically states that the monster dwelt in Lycia, a region distinctly outside ancient Greece. It would be wonderful—not to mention a tremendous boon to the tar pit argument—if Lycia contained tar pits full of fossilized predators, but Lycia does not have any oil or tar pits. Lycia does have interesting geologic features that are worth noting, though. Both Homer and Hesiod say that Chimera had the ability to breathe fire. Homer specifically describes it as “snorting out the breath of the terrible flame.” Intriguingly, Lycia is one of a few places where natural gas slowly leaks out of Earth’s crust to the surface. Today, people light this gas and, because there is a limitless supply seeping out from below, the flame never goes out. Before human mastery of fire, people would have been unable to light this gas, but a single wildfire in the area resulting from a lightning strike, could have changed that in a hurry. Once lit in such a way, the flames would have kept on burning, leading those who discovered them to wonder what could cause fire, with seemingly no source, to burn for such a long time.

  For traders and travelers coming from communities along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Lycia was on the way to Greece. Grains, copper, iron, dates, and wine all migrated along Greek and Phoenician trade routes that started where Israel and Syria are today and hugged the southern Turkish coastline. Some traders would have undoubtedly stopped for rest and resupply in Lycia. Did those who saw strange mixtures of bones in stinking blackened petroleum-filled rocks in the Middle East make a connection with the stench of burning petroleum gas at Lycia and bring the two elements together in the form of the fire-breathing Chimera? The possibility is a tantalizing one. Certainly the initial discovery of strange-looking bones and flames leaping out of the earth all on their own must have scared the hell out of people. The ingredients were there for the birth of a monster, but there is even more to fear in the creature when deeply seated psychological tendencies are taken into consideration.

  Monstrous mélange

  At its core, Chimera is an aberration, a creature that deviates from normal biology in an extreme way. Make no mistake, it likely arose from fears of the unexplainable features that people were finding in the natural world, but it endured because these natural observations led to the imagining of something quite horrible. Chimera’s weird blend of animals made it a vile sight to behold, and science is now suggesting that humans may be hardwired to react negatively to its alien body structure.

  A topic of frequent discussion among researchers who study human mate selection and health is symmetry. A number of studies over the years have explored how people view others with perfectly symmetrical faces and faces that are somewhat asymmetrical. It turns out that people associate symmetrical faces with increased health and are more attracted to them. In contrast, asymmetrical features are seen negatively.

  Growths that make one part of the face become deformed, mutations that cause people to develop six fingers on one hand, wounds, jagged scars, and malformed spines that cause one shoulder to become significantly higher or lower than the other are all, sadly, viewed with various levels of distaste. The evolutionary reasons for this are widely thought to be associated with fitness. Like all animals, humans are driven to reproduce with partners who will help them have lots of healthy children. If a potential partner has numerous scars and/or malformations, these could be associated with poor reflexes, a weak immune system that has allowed the person to suffer from considerable disease, past episodes of malnutrition, or bad genes. Thus, the evolutionary argument goes, we view these traits negatively because they hint that a potential partner carries genes that we don’t want to mix with our own. This negative view of asymmetricality is not limited to attraction; it has spilled over into popular culture and become associated with overall “badness.” This is why villains like the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride and the lion Scar in The Lion King are so often associated with these sorts of characteristics. In fact, their names are their deformity, because the negative essence of the trait represents them so completely.

  Looking at Chimera is, in effect, not much different from looking at a human who has two heads, a scar running across one eye, or a missing limb, and this adds to the monster’s fear factor.

  Chimera itself does not feature much in modern books, films, or television, but many of the fears that it embodied are alive and well. When H. G. Wells wrote The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1896, he was looking out upon the dawn of a sci
entific era when surgery and veterinary science were beginning to suggest that biological tampering might make it possible to merge human and animal features. The scientist, Dr. Moreau, uses his knowledge of physiology to make animals more human, effectively creating creatures that are neither man nor beast. These beast folk strive to throw off their animal instincts and struggle to follow a strict code of laws in their primitive society. They are forbidden from hunting, chasing, walking on all fours, and lapping up water with their tongues, and they continually repeat the mantra “Are we not men?” Yet as the story unfolds, animal instincts prove difficult for the beast folk to control, and the island slowly collapses into dangerous disorder with the question “Are we not men?” resoundingly answered with a no.

  Wells makes a clear argument that tinkering with life by using surgery to try and make animals more human is something dangerous. Prendick, the shipwrecked protagonist, finds the beast folk horrific, and many of his encounters with them in the jungle interior of the island are the stuff of nightmares. If the idea of humanized animals brings to mind ancient monstrous creatures that merged human and animal features like the Sphinx and the spine-tailed Manticore, that should only further drive home the point that mixing human and animal traits creates creatures that have terrified people for millennia.

  Yet in The Island of Dr. Moreau there is an intriguing contrast to the mixed monsters of ancient history. While Chimera, Cerberus, Manticore, Scylla, and others were monsters created by the gods, the beast folk of Dr. Moreau’s island are entirely the result of a single man recklessly wielding science. Indeed, just as King Kong is clearly a monster movie with a monster that is not so easy to vilify because of human cruelty toward the giant ape, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a monster story where the monsters are really rather pitiful victims of the doctor’s scientific work. That Dr. Moreau is a villain is readily apparent.22 But where exactly the monster in the monster story resides is hard to say, since the two key elements found in monsters—a visage of horror and a willingness to harm others—are somewhat divided.