The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

Such a fresh perspective. This book is blowing my mind.

Brilliant book, the arguments of author make very much sense and give a remarkable insight into the origin of the stories sourrounding mythological creatures. This book is very well written and easily accessible to lay-people despite its very scientific nature.

A fascinating subject crossing several academic disciplines that have so far been operating in a siloed manner. Although, aside from the newly formed awareness I’m not sure wether there is much ground for extensive overlap and academic coordination.As a lay-classicist I’m mostly interested from an ancient history- and myth point of view and was looking for many links to ancient palaeontology, which the book provides. The book is very readable and rich in historical anecdotes and references to giant bones, a few of which were known to me, but most weren’t.Having said that, at some stage it gets a bit repetitive. Moreover while I can see how giant bone discoveries add to existing myths and legends, its far from certain that the skeleton of a specific dinosaur initiated the belief in a certain mythological or religious creature. This may have had a different basis. And we’ll never know. As such the book is somewhat suggestive and partly based on conjecture. Even so I enjoyed it very much. And do think this is an important work.

Mayor takes into account the vast amount of prehistoric animal remains and links them to mythology very convincingly. I thoroughly enjoyed it and now I look at myths, legends and fabulous creatures in a very different light. Fasicnating.

This is a well written book which relates mythical monsters to the discovery of fossil remains by the ancients. Very well researched and quite convincing.

The author is undoubtedly right about many of the things in the book, but it tires a little with all the appeals to incredulity. Just because something looks obvious or right to us, it does not make it so. This is a pity as this rhetorical flaw gets in the way of an otherwise very well structured and interesting argument.The collection of classical authors at the back is both good work and useful.The book, while interesting, did not have me turning the pages as I had anticipated as it was neither archaeological nor paleontological but lost in a limbo straddling the two. diagrams and images could have been a little better also.Otherwise, a good story, which every excavator should at least know about to avoid losing more information as good stuff is thrown out with the rubbish on digs.

Explains how many ancient myths "explained" the fossil remains found in various parts of the ancient world.

If you are interested in why it took so long for people to understand fossils, this is a great read. I think the basic idea occurred to a few people, but Adrienne Mayor's book was the first to fully articulate it. Books with illustrations are never much of a success on a Kindle e reader, especially the early ones, and if in colour you are better off with a Kindle Fire, but one accepts the limitations of the format. This was one of the first books I got on my Kindle, and I still return to it from time to time.

Simplesmente fantástico!! Minha única crítica é que o livro veio sem nenhuma proteção.

très vivant, très accessible, original et sûr, de l'humour (dès le titre "les premiers chasseurs de fossiles"). Une vision neuve de la formation des mythes grecs et de l'invention des monstres qui les peuplent...

If ever I read a book that was more meticulously researched than this one, I don't recall it. Adrienne Mayor does an incredible job of piecing together a paleontological puzzle long hidden in mythical obscurity. The First Fossil Hunters is an academic marvel that connects ambiguous dots to draw a picture of fossil discoveries that underwent anthropomorphic and monstrous conversions to accommodate mythical belief and hero worship.Mayor speaks to the average reader without dumbing down the narrative, or leaving the reader in esoteric limbo. One never wonders what she's trying to say, and all speculation is clearly defined without being weighed down by insistent presumption. The book is a joy to read, logical and well reasoned throughout. However, those who prefer to be entertained by childish monster stories, or prefer to look for the reality in myths, or cling to the foolish idea that there are living dinosaurs may find Mayor's book tediously disagreeable.Much of the book covers ancient interest in fossils with the overlying message shining a bright light on a complete misunderstanding by the early finders of what those fossils truly represented. Prehistoric dinosaur bones became griffins, and mammoths became giants and heroes. Other bones were deceitfully arranged to create tritons, nereirdes, and centaurs to dupe the willing believers. A few modern day hoaxes are mentioned for comparison, as well as to support Mayor's findings.Mayor's book subliminally touches on common sense and gullibility as it speculates and expounds on the whos, whats, whys, and wherefores of paleomythology. One can compare much of what she presents in her findings to modern day attitudes and interpretations.Though Mayer states that her findings and sources are far from exhaustive, the reader would swear that she left no stone unturned. I felt she covered the subject with impressive thoroughness. I highly recommend this book, and look forward to reading Mayor's companion book about early fossil hunters in the Americas.In short, this book was fantastic.

Loving it: a random book on a random topic, yet fascinating and likely true. A gem of a find!

Whether your passion is classical archaeology, paleontology, folklore, ancient literature, ancient history or the history of science, or if you just enjoy seeing a brilliant piece of interdisciplinary scholarship convincingly argued, this book is a MUST. Mayor has connected the dots between disciplines that do not communicate with each other nearly enough, to find the origins of mythical griffins, giants and monsters in the fossil records of Asia, Greece, and Egypt. Our early ancestors were far more observant and curious than we sometimes give them credit for being; they could see the same fossils that modern paleontologists have seen of Protoceratops Andrewsii in the Gobi desert. And they could create imaginative reconstructions of the living animals, just as we do in natural history museums today. Nomadic gold prospectors of central Asia intuited the connection between dinosaurs and birds long before modern paleontology did, and for all we know, Protoceratops may well have had feathers rather than scales. In Greece and Egypt, dinosaur fossils are unknown but finds of prehistoric mammal bones are fairly common -- in fact, one extinct mammal, the Samothere, bears the name of the Greek island where its bones were first identified. Ancient historians frequently mention remarkable discoveries of enormous bones, usually identified by the finders as the relics of giants or ancient heroes. These discoveries correspond closely with the locations of fossil deposits.Mayor has done profound, exhaustive research in a variety of fields, and presents meticulously documented evidence for her theories, but the book reads as entertainingly as a good detective novel, and is just as accessible to the layman as to her fellow scholars. At the same time, Mayor never talks down to the reader or oversimplifies a complex subject. This is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship, written the way most scholars only wish we could write.