by Matt Kaplan
That this clashes with instinctive fears of dark or murky water and the predators hiding within is unmistakable. That it runs alongside some astounding recent research showing deep ocean environments to be special places with remarkable life-forms in need of protection makes such a story all the more worth telling. The critical question is if people can overcome the innate fears that may have helped keep their ancestors alive.
Whether fear or reason wins will ultimately depend upon what stories get told. For the sake of the animals in the deep oceans, hope for more tales like The Abyss.
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37 Remember how Titanic ends? Yeah, that’s what hypothermia-induced drowning looks like.
38 Of course, a counter argument can be made that many of the “vessels” used during the classical period would charitably be called floating fruit baskets today, so the whirlpool might not have needed to be that much bigger to have been viewed as dangerous.
39 Hanging out in the Mediterranean year-round sounds like the easy life, but in fact these whales are among the most threatened in the world. There are no Icelandic or Japanese whalers to hunt them, but they are effectively living in a giant fishbowl (or perhaps a better metaphor would be a giant toilet). The Mediterranean has only a very small opening connecting it to the Atlantic, and not much water circulates between the two. This means that any pollutants produced by the huge (and often not especially conservation-minded) populations living around the Mediterranean stay in the sea for decades before circulating out. Exactly what long-term effect these pollutants are having on the whales is not entirely known, but it can’t be good.
40 National Geographic sent an expedition to the loch in 1977 that overturned every rock, scanned every ripple, and monitored the entire ecosystem so closely that if a monster did exist, it would have been found. Nothing turned up. Years later it was revealed that the key monster photograph released decades earlier was a fraud.
41 Some marine biologists have taken on the task of studying the contents of dead sperm whale stomachs. It is a dreadful (and smelly) activity, but it has proved, without any doubt, that sperm whales do eat giant squid.
42 Here’s the logic. Shark attacks are rare to begin with. If they did take place in ancient times, the body would not have been recovered by terrified viewers of the attack but rather be left as fish food. In either case, human bones are extremely unlikely to fossilize under such conditions. Incidentally, in 2009, a paleontology team discovered shark teeth wedged into the bones of a plesiosaur (one of the huge marine reptiles discussed earlier that are often associated with Loch Ness). The teeth were of different sizes, indicating that the enormous reptile was attacked by numerous sharks. They argued that it was quite possibly the earliest evidence ever found of sharks entering a feeding frenzy. And because the attacks were made on an animal with big bones that did not break easily, the evidence actually got recorded. The bones of a human caught in a shark feeding frenzy would likely be obliterated.
43 There is a chance that this tourist activity is actually teaching sharks to associate human divers with food and potentially increasing the number of shark attacks in regions where this activity is happening. Whether sharks are smart enough to make this association remains to be determined, but it is an idea that should at least give would-be shark divers pause.
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5
Of Flame and Claw—Dragons
“They’re seriously misunderstood creatures.”
—Rubeus Hagrid, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Dragons are among the world’s most enduring monsters. They appear early in Babylonian myths about the great wars fought between their gods, then crop up again in tales of the Greek hero Jason and the witch Medea. Later, they appear in medieval lore and are famous for doing battle with the likes of Saint George and Saint Margaret and for breathing blasts of deadly fire upon warriors like Sigfried and Beowulf. Dragons have even made it to the modern day, attacking Bilbo Baggins and chasing after Harry Potter on his broomstick. Yet in spite of their long life span as monsters, and the widely varied stories that they have appeared in throughout the ages, dragons are remarkably consistent in form.
Tiamat. Cylinder seal impression. Neo-Assyrian, 900–750 BC. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
No fuzzy or remotely mammal-like dragons have ever been described. Even the most ancient of these monsters are covered in reptilian scales. According to Babylonian mythology, there was an ancient conflict between the great gods Apsu and Tiamat and their children. This conflict led to Apsu being killed and Tiamat growing very angry. To avenge her partner’s murder, Tiamat transformed herself into a serpentine creature with horns and a wriggling body. Exactly what this creature looked like is not clear from ancient writings, but artwork offers a hint. A cylinder seal at the British Museum shows Tiamat with a horned head, a lengthy tongue, tiny forelimbs, and a very long body.
The similarity to a serpent is obvious, and it seems fair to ask if snake fear was playing a role in inspiring the form Tiamat took. The Babylonians certainly would have had some exposure to venomous snakes and, when they were trying to come up with a frightening form for their god to take, simply settled on one belonging to a dangerous animal in their environment. Yet the horns are a bit of a mystery. Goats have horns, and there were certainly goats around Babylon, but goats do not traditionally qualify as scary animals. However, a look at venomous snakes provides a possible answer.
One of the most dangerous snakes in southern Europe and the Middle East is a species known as Vipera ammodytes, commonly known as the sand viper. It has long fangs that can readily puncture human skin, a foul temper, and potent venom. Whether this specific snake is related to the dragon that Tiamat transformed into is, at first, disputable. Yet if the scales on its head are taken into account, they hint at a connection, since scales just behind the sand viper’s eyes grow larger than those on the rest of its head and look like horns.
In other parts of the world, the connection between snakes and dragons is also strong. In the story of the Golden Fleece, the hero Jason goes with the witch Medea to collect the fleece from a dangerous creature. What this creature is exactly is also not obvious. The Greek poet Pindar, who lived during the fifth century BC, wrote, “For the fleece was laid in a deep thicket, held within the fierce jaws of a ravenous dragon, far surpassing in length and breadth a ship of fifty oars.” Yet according to the poet and scholar Apollonius Rhodius, “The fleece is spread on top of an oak, watched over by a serpent, a formidable beast who peers all round and never, night or day, allows sweet sleep to conquer his unblinking eyes.”
The Greek texts call the monster dracos. This is the word from which the Anglo-Saxon word “drakan” and the modern words “drake” and “dragon” are thought to come, but the ancient Greek term is ambiguous. It was also the word for snake. This is why some English translations of the various historical accounts call the creature Jason tangled with a serpent.
To complicate matters, the art associated with Jason and his quest is also inconsistent. On one iconic Greek jar (made at an unknown date during the Classical period, 500–300 BC), Jason is reaching for the Golden Fleece as a snake rears up from behind the treasure preparing to strike. Yet on a Greek plate made sometime between 500 and 450 BC, the monster guarding the fleece dwarfs Jason as it vomits him up after grabbing him with its rows of sharp teeth.44 It has a noticeably snakelike body but otherwise looks a lot like what modern audiences would consider a dragon.
Jason about to Steal the Golden Fleece, attributed to the Orchard Painter. Greek, terra-cotta column-krater, c. 470–460 BC. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art Research, NY.
Jason and the Dragon, attributed to Douris. Greek ceramic kylix, 500–450 BC. Museo Gregoriano Etrusco Vaticano, Vatican City. Art Resource, NY.
Stories of other Greek dragons further complicate the situation. In Euripides’ play Medea, which describes Medea’s activities after she helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece,
she runs into trouble with the law in Corinth after she murders its king and his daughter. To make her escape, she uses her magic to conjure dragons. Yet these creatures can fly. A text that has historically been attributed to Apollodorus describes them as “winged dragons” pulling a chariot. Yet the Roman poet Ovid writes that after pulling Medea’s chariot over great distance, the dragons “sloughed their aged skins of many years.” They had wings, a distinctly nonserpentine characteristic, but shed their skins just as snakes do. This hints at snakes being key for dragon inspiration, but venomous snakes help to explain only some of the physical appearance of dragons. When it comes to their size, venomous snakes don’t provide much of a model at all.
Dinosaurs and their kin make an obvious choice for the ancestors of dragons since they were often very big and left behind skeletons that appear distinctly dragonlike in form. However, dinosaurs present a problem because their fossils are not found in Greece and are rare throughout much of the Mediterranean. Even so, some Greeks sailed to far-off places and may have encountered large reptile skeletons on their travels.
Pytheas, a Greek explorer, made it to Britain around 325 BC and seems to have traveled as far north as Scotland and as far west as Cornwall. If he really did make it that far west, he would have sailed along the Dorset coast, an area littered with the fossils of giant marine reptiles.
Toothy and fierce-looking plesiosaurs, pliosaurs, and ichthyosaurs are all commonly found eroding out of the rocks in this region. In fact, so many of these animals have been found in the area that it has come to be known as the Jurassic Coast. Pytheas would very likely have stopped along these shores and possibly encountered fossils along the way. And that is just the story of Pytheas. Himilco, a Carthagian explorer who was active roughly a hundred years earlier than Pytheas, journeyed to Spain, France, and England, and may have had similar encounters.
If a plesiosaur neck, or the neck of some closely related species, was found embedded in rock, how would people living long ago have made sense of it? Would they have come to the conclusion that it was the neck of a giant snakelike monster? Most large marine reptiles had sharp teeth too. These teeth were not anything like the fragile, venom-injecting fangs found in snakes but more robust and dragonlike. If just the head and neck of one of these animals were found, it seems plausible that this could have raised fears that such huge carnivores really existed. But there is more.
In The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan argues that we should consider the ancient environment where early mammals first lived when thinking about the fears that humans have. Mammals evolved during the Mesozoic era, when reptiles ruled the world. Dinosaurs were everywhere, and the few mammals that were around were tiny rodentlike creatures that spent most of their time scurrying away from death in the form of Velociraptor and juvenile tyrannosaur teeth. For this reason, Sagan suggests that the appearance of any mammalian genes that coded for an inherent fear of and respect for large reptiles would have led to increased survival, and this fear would have been driven by natural selection to become common throughout the early mammal population.45
In recent years, Sagan’s theory has gained a lot of support. A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011, which documented the interactions between preliterate Philippine hunter-gatherers and giant pythons, found that fifteen of fifty-eight people (26 percent) in the local population had been attacked by huge pythons during living memory. Most exhibited substantial scars from the bites made during the snakes’ attempts to grab hold of them. Moreover, a startling 16 percent of the people knew at least one tribe member who had been killed by the reptiles. The researchers behind the study counted up a total of six fatalities in the past generation.
One man named Dinsiweg was found inside the body of a large snake that was killed and cut open by his son in 1940. Another, a twenty-five-year-old man named Diladeg, did not return home from hunting one day and was found the following afternoon crushed to death in the coils of a python. Two children had been consumed by a python that slithered into their home just before sundown in 1973, and in the same year a woman named Pasing died from an infection that developed from a python bite.
The researchers learned from the people’s stories that most attacking pythons were between 16 and 32 feet (5–10 meters) long, tended to make ambush attacks when men were walking through dense rain forest seeking game, and were most often fended off with large knives. What struck the scientists as astonishing, however, was that even with the availability of metal knives, fatalities still often occurred. They reasoned that in the days before the natives had metal knives, fatalities would have been far higher than the 9.6 percent of the population per generation that the giant snakes currently claim. They don’t give a proposed percentage, but even if it were 14 percent, that would be quite a lot. As a comparison, if 14 percent of the U.S. population were picked off by pythons in a generation, that would be more than 40 million people.
The shocking thing about this recent python study is that it provides good evidence that huge, nonvenomous snakes have been feeding on humans for a long time. So it raises the question: Were the depictions of the Babylonian Tiamat the result of sand viper characteristics being mixed with those of giant constrictors? Probably.
According to reports made by several Roman historians, in the midst of the First Punic War in the late summer of 256 BC, Roman troops heading toward Carthage (in Tunisia) were attacked by a great serpent when they came to a river. The following is an account by the historian Orosius:
Regulus, chosen by lot for the Carthaginian War, marched with his army to a point not far from the Bagradas River and there pitched his camp. In that place a reptile of astonishing size devoured many of the soldiers as they went down to the river to get water. Regulus set out with his army to attack the reptile. Neither the javelins they hurled nor the darts they rained upon its back had any effect. These glided off its horrible network of scales… so that the creature suffered no injury. Finally, when Regulus saw that it was sidelining a great number of his soldiers with its bites, was trampling them down by its charge, and driving them mad by its poisonous breath, he ordered ballistae [wooden devices similar to catapults] brought up. A stone taken from a wall was hurled by a ballista; this struck the spine of the serpent and weakened the constitution of its entire body. The formation of the reptile was such that, though it seemed to lack feet, yet it had ribs and scales graded evenly, extending from the top of its throat to the lowest part of its belly and so arranged that the creature rested upon its scales as if on claws and upon its ribs as if on legs. But it did not move like the worm, which has a flexible spine and moves by first stretching its contracted parts in the direction of its tiny body and then drawing together the stretched parts. This reptile made its way by a sinuous movement, extending its sides first right and then left, so that it might keep the line of ribs rigid along the exterior arch of the spine; nature fastened the claws of its scales to its ribs, which extend straight to their highest point; making these moves alternately and quickly, it not only glided over levels, but also mounted inclines, taking as many footsteps, so to speak, as it had ribs. This is why the stone rendered the creature powerless. If struck by a blow in any part of the body from its belly to its head, it is crippled and unable to move, because wherever the blow falls, it weakens the spine, which stimulates the feet of the ribs and the motion of the body. Hence this serpent, which had for a long time withstood so many javelins unharmed, moved about disabled from the blow of a single stone and, quickly overcome by spears, was easily destroyed. Its skin was brought to Rome—it is said to have been one hundred and twenty feet in length—and for some time was an object of wonder to all.
The “serpent” is clearly a snake of some sort. It has ribs but no feet, moves sinuously, and glides over the ground. The creature’s “poisonous breath” can be explained by a foul smell from the river and, even though no snakes can eat multiple adult humans in such a short time, it is possible that numerous men were bitte
n and drowned by a single large snake. However, no snakes attain 120 feet (36 meters) in length. Titanoboa, a python relative from the days of the dinosaurs, grew to 48 feet (15 meters), but snakes of such huge size have never coexisted with humans. Were the authors of the story just making this up? Or were they somehow getting their measurements wrong? In 2004, Richard Stothers at the Goddard Institute for Space Science46 wrote about the Bagradas River incident in the journal Isis, proposing that the ancient reports of this snake mixed up 120 feet in length with the figure of 120 rib pairs (which the snake could have had). Moreover, he argued that even though large constrictors are not found north of the Sahara today, Pliny the Elder reported large snakes sometimes swimming in groups across the Red Sea from Ethiopia to Arabia. If this were true, he reasoned, they might have made it to the Bagradas River as well.
All of this hints that classical civilizations may have been encountering some very large constrictors in northern Africa, and when these stories are coupled with the hundreds of people who have died in living memory in the jaws of crocodiles, Sagan’s theories make a lot of sense. There might really be an ancient, genetically based fear of all reptiles present in mammals that is still being selected for by evolutionary forces. It is an intriguing idea to be sure, and one that could easily work in concert with fears of snakes and ancient reptile bones. Yet neither giant constrictors nor marine reptiles explain the fact that dragons ultimately evolved the ability to breathe fire.