The Fossil Folklore of Unicorns & Dragons

Unicorns & Dragons

The mystical significance to man in the past of many of the groups of invertebrate fossils stemmed from the fact that modern representatives were unfamiliar to him in his every-day life, either because the groups were extinct or because they occupied environments such as the offshore marine areas that were inaccessible to him.  In contrast, the remains of fossil vertebrate animals were much more readily recognizable as being related to living vertebrates, especially those that lived on land, so that in general there was less superstition or folklore attached to them.  Of course there were exceptions, most notably in the attempts to recognize and reconstruct such mythical animals as unicorns and dragons.

Otto von Guericke's Unicorn

Early Classical and Medieval beliefs that the pulverized horn of the fabled unicorn acted as powerful medicine led to extensive efforts to discover specimens.  Modern cow and rhinoceros horn were long passes off as substitutes, but by the Middle Ages the long, corscrew-like horn of the narwhal became accepted as genuine.  Then in about 1600 the fossil remains of some woolly mammoths from the Ice Age were found in Europe and 'experts' identified the tusks as those of the true unicorn.  Almost immediately narwhal tusks were decried as unicornum falsum, and the mammoths became unicornum verum.  Western man continued to believe in the validity of the unicorn until about the end of the 17th Century, and in 1663 the Mayor of Magdeburg in Germany, Otto von Guericke, made the first attempt at a reconstruction based mainly on mammoth bones from a large find in a quarry near Quedlinburg.  In 1827 the French zoologist George Cuvier showed that the unicorn was a zoological impossibility, and since the true nature of the fossil mammoths had then been discovered the myth gradually disappeared into history.

In addition to the mammoth, the bones of various other Tertiary and Pleistocene mammals such as the cave-bear, the mastodon and the sabre-toothed tiger were long regarded in some regions as dragon bones, again thought to have strong medicinal properties.  Such beliefs in China date back to well over 1000 B.C., and even today the names Lung-gu (dragon bone) and Lung-chi (dragon teeth) are used for some fossil mammals, the latter in particular for the teeth of the three-toed horse Hipparion.

Remains of the large Mesozoic reptiles have received remarkably little attention in folk history, but two examples from Britain with recent associations are worthy of note.  The marine ichthyosaurs were once interpreted as fossil sea-dragons, but they have long been identified correctly as reptiles with a dolphin-like shape.  In the latter part of the 19th Century numerous virtually complete ichthyosaur skeletons were quarried from the Lower Lias (Jurassic) rocks around Street in Somerset, and with time this fossil came to be used as an emblem of the town; it is still used on roadside signs welcoming visitors to Street, and was incorporated in the seal of the Urban District Council until that body ceased to exist in 1974.  Quarrying operations in other parts of Britain during the 19th Century also revealed many specimens of Jurassic ichthyosaurs, and the reports of the finds of these striking fossils often caused excitement among the general public.  the familiarity to the public was reflected in the publication of a cartoon and poem in Punch in February 1885, entitled Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus; here the ichthyosaur drew particular attention to one of his most distinctive morphological features, his eye, but lamented the fact that his brain was too poorly developed to allow him to achieve greater things:

[excerpt omitted]

The second British example involves the Iguanodon, the large Cretaceous dinosaurian reptile discovered in Tilgate Forest, Sussex in 1822 by Gideon Mantell and first described by him in 1825.  In recognition of this discovery, the nearby Borough of Maidstone included a reconstruction of the Iguanodon in its Coat of Arms in 1949 when the College of Arms granted a Crest and Supporters in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first charter of the town.  The present Maidstone Borough Council continues to use the same device for decorative purposes. 

Taken from : 

" 'Formed Stones', Folklore and Fossils."  Michael G. Bassett.  Department of Geology, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.  Geological Series No. 1.  Cardiff, October 1982. 

© National Museum of Wales 1982.