Did the Romans Know About Dinosaurs?

Mosaic of Ketos, the sea monster, found at Caulonia (Monasterace) in the Casa del Drago, 3rd century BCE now in the National Archaeological Museum of Calabria courtesy of Miguel Hermoso Cuesta.

If you ever find yourself in Texas, heaven forbid, with a day to spare, I recommend a trip to the Dinosaur Valley State Park, where you can spend a pleasant day in the sun, dabbling your scorched toes in the footprints of ancient mega-beasts, cooled by the soothing sweet waters of the Paluxy River. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs trundled about in the mud at the edge of a vast, ancient ocean - the same ocean bed that now leaves Texas with its vast, curving, lonely horizons of nothingness and yearning despair. It's only a short drive from the famous cattle town of Fort Worth, where they guarantee cows and cowboys and a strange sense of disappointment. Amusingly, on the way to see the dinosaur footprints, you might find yourself driving past the Creation Museum, packed to the corrugated zinc rafters with 'evidence' that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that man and dinosaur lived together.

It is, unsurprisingly, not a very large building.

That the bones of dinosaurs and other extinct megafauna provided the basis for legendary monsters of yore, such as dragons and Minotaurs, giants and krakens is, by now, universally accepted. Whether this is true or not is another matter and one which, for the purposes of this article, we're not really going to focus on. The mythology of such stories is a whole article in itself, and a fascinating one, but today we're going to focus on a much simpler brief.

What did the Romans know about dinosaurs? Did they know anything about them at all? Did they find dinosaur bones? Surprisingly, perhaps, it's a rather easy question to answer.

Firstly, we must say that the idea of 'dinosaurs' as great fossil lizards didn't begin in any scholarly fashion until the 17th Century, and it wasn't until 1842 that Sir Richard Owen, who was an absolute barmpot, began to try and classify these creatures in an academic form. It was he who formed the name 'dinosaur', following the odd practice of smashing together the Greek word 'deinos' (terrible) and the Latin 'sauros' (lizard).

But we do know that the bones of such creatures were found before this. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon concluded that fossil shells were the remains of sealife and that this showed that what is now land was once the sea. The Chinese historian Chang Qu, during the Western Jin Dynasty (AD 265–316), reported the discovery of dragon bones at Wucheng in Sichuan Province (Dong,1992).

But did the Romans know about such bones?

Phlegon of Tralles was a freedman of the emperor Hadrian famous for compiling a written collection of rather excitable marvels and curiosities commonly known as 'Amazing Stories'. This pulp fiction title accurately fits the sensational and sometimes irrational nature of the stories within, which are designed to titillate and excite the Roman appetite for such fripperies. In contrast to the highfalutin and rational approach of the scholarly Greeks, the Romans loved a bit of tabloidy nonsense. That's not to say, however, that we should treat everything within Amazing Stories as nonsense. In the UK, there used to be a wonderfully daft (and somewhat pornographic) daily newspaper called The Daily Sport, which was famous for openly containing 'news' that was comically over-the-top 'fun'. If I tell you that it used to feature such 'breaking news' as 'World War II Bomber Found on Moon' (complete with a report on how the aircrew were found in an apparently rather confused state), then you get the drift. 'Aliens Turned My Son into a Fish Finger' was another highlight.

Although Phlegon's stories are sensationalised, they must still contain an element of truth in order for sensationalism to work. Where The Daily Sport relied on the reader not believing a word of it right from the start in order for the joke to work, Phlegon is not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. He is spinning the sensational side of the stories in order to sell them to a voracious readership.

Here's what he has to say about an event that happened during the reign of Tiberius.

"Among the places that suffered from the earthquake were numerous cities in Sicily as well as the regions around Rhegium, and numerous peoples in Pontus were also struck. In the cracks in the earth huge bodies appeared that the local inhabitants were hesitant to move, although as a sample they sent to Rome a tooth of one of the bodies. It was not just a foot long but even greater than this measurement. The delegates showed it to Tiberius and asked him if he wished the hero to be brought to him. Tiberius devised a shrewd plan such that, while not depriving himself of a knowledge of its size, he avoided the sacrilege of the robbing of the dead. He summoned a certain geometer, Pulcher by name, a man of some renown whom he respected for the man's skill, and bade him fashion a face in proportion to the size of the tooth. The geometer estimated how large the entire body as well as the face would be by means of the weight of the tooth, hastily made a construction, and brought it to the emperor. Tiberius, saying that the sight of this was sufficient for him, sent the tooth back to where it had come from."

(Amazing Stories. XIV)

But he goes on:

"An Exhibit of Bones: One should not disbelieve the foregoing narrative, since in Nitriai in Egypt bodies are exhibited that are no smaller than these and are not concealed in the earth but are unencumbered and plain to see. The bones do not lie mixed together in disorder but are arranged in such a manner that a person viewing them recognizes some as thigh bones others as shin bones and so on with the other limbs. One should not disbelieve in these bones either, considering that in the beginning when nature was in her prime she reared everything near to gods, but just as time is running down, so also the sizes of creatures have been shrinking."

(Amazing Stories. XV)

"I have also heard reports of bones in Rhodes that are so huge that in comparison the human beings of the present day are greatly inferior in size."

(Amazing Stories. XVI)

Are these tales of dinosaur bones? It's hard to say for sure, of course. But I would have loved to have seen the face that Pulcher recreated to house the giant tooth they found. We can say with certainty, though, that they knew these were the bones of ancient animals of immense size. That sounds like a dinosaur to me.

References

Dong, Zhiming (1992). Dinosaurian Faunas of China (English ed.). Beijing; Berlin; New York: China Ocean Press.

Phlegon of Tralles, Amazing Stories, (1996) translated by William F. Hansen, University of Exeter Press.

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