Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
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wrongly to believe that our predecessors were acquainted with dinosaurs.
Chinese traditions tell that it was a dragon that sowed the seed of their race. Thousands of years ago, it is said that a tribal leader, Yandi (炎帝), was born out of his mother’s telepathic communication with a mighty dragon. Huangdi (皇帝 the yellow Emperor) and the dragon launched the prelude to the Chinese people when Yandi became the Emperor’s deputy. So the ancient Chinese took to referring to themselves as originating with Yandi and Huangdi, as well as being descendants of the Chinese dragon. The dragon is first recorded in Chinese archæology in the Xinglongwa culture, which dates back more than 7,000 years. Sites excavated from Liangzhu, and from the Yangshao era in Xi’an, include clay pots bearing dragon motifs, and a Xishuipo burial plot in Puyang from the Yangshao people reveals a skeleton of a human flanked by mosaics made from seashells, with a tiger on one side and a dinosaur dragon on the other. The Chinese were the first to record their impression of dinosaur fossils, though they were not alone.3
From ancient Mesopotamia comes an exquisite seal made some 5,500 years ago that seems to show a dinosaur. It is a small cylindrical seal carved from green jasper and shaped like a barrel, which could be rolled across wax or clay to leave an impression. This example was excavated at Uruk in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and is in the collections of The Louvre in Paris. Uruk was once a large and advanced civilization for its time, with impressive buildings and a complex hierarchical social structure. The creatures that were engraved into the surface of their seals often represent domesticated or wild animals, though this example is unusual. It seems to have the appearance of a sauropod dinosaur, and could perhaps have been inspired by a fossil. We know that fossils were known to the ancients, because of writings that date back 1,000 years. The Book of Healing (in Arabic: کتاب الشفاء) was written by the Persian philosopher Ibn Sīnā (Persian: ابن سینا), who is known to present-day Western scholars as Avicenna. His is a remarkable book, covering natural history and mathematics, astronomy and even music, and was written between AD 1010 and 1020. The work is not all his, of course; this was meant as a compendium of current knowledge and contains much information from the ancient Greek writers including Aristotle and Ptolemy, together with the findings of other Persian and Arabic writers. He wrote of fossils as if they were familiar objects, and believed that fossilization occurred when subsidence caused the release of a ‘petrifying virtue’ that subtly transformed substances into stone. He felt that there was nothing surprising about this; it was no more remarkable than the ‘transformation of the waters,’ he wrote.
Notions of the movement of the Earth’s surface and changes with geological time were part of the common currency in the ancient Middle East, though they did not emerge in European philosophy until they were expounded by Magnus Albertus, a physician and polymath, born in 1200, who became widely regarded as the greatest German mind of the Middle Ages. He also wrote of fossils, saying that the rocks around Paris were a rich source of ‘shells shaped like the moon’ that were enveloped by viscous mud and were preserved by the ‘dryness of the stone’.4 For centuries in the West, the occurrence of fossilized seashells on raised ground was taken as evidence of the biblical flood.
Travel now across the world to Cambodia, where the Khmer people live, and at Angkor Wat you will find an ancient image of a dinosaur. There is a stegosaur carved into a wall in the temple of Ta Prohm which was constructed on the orders of the god-king Jayavarman VII and was dedicated in AD 1186. Surviving records show that more than 12,000 people lived in the temple compound at its peak, including 18 high priests and 615 dancers, with another 100,000 villagers dwelling nearby, trading with the temple authorities and providing goods, food and services. Carved into the temple walls are numerous symbolic images, and they were protected by being overgrown with jungle vegetation for centuries so that the building, even though penetrated by massive tree roots, escaped being restored by overeager Europeans. The stegosaur carving has been cited by creationists to show that humans were acquainted with living dinosaurs. The likeness, they say, is anatomically correct – but it isn’t. A real Stegosaurus had a small head and a pointed, spiked tail; the carving at Ta Prohm has a distinctive, larger, head and there is no sign of the typical stegosaurian spiked tail. The dorsal plates are vividly carved, but a living stegosaur had two rows of plates that were more numerous than in the carving. This temple decoration was emphatically not carved by someone who had a living dinosaur as the reference for the image. They could, however, have seen petrified remains. The fossil of a Stegosaurus trapped in limestone strata often reveals only one set of dorsal plates, and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the head (or the tail) was absent. Stegosaurs had proportionately tiny heads, and the skulls of fossilized dinosaurs are usually missing. Partial fossils are far more abundant than complete dinosaur skeletons, and it is easy to see how an ancient sculptor would have invented a head for his carving. Some present-day amateurs claim that the large plates along the back of this carving ‘more closely resemble leaves’ and they try to assert that the Ta Prohm carving is ‘a boar or rhinoceros against a leafy background’. Like so much scholarly speculation about dinosaurs, this is fanciful. The evidence offers nothing to suggest this is right.5
It has even been alleged that there are no stegosaur fossils in Cambodia by which the carving could have been inspired, but this ignores several realities. First, there are stegosaur skeletons all around the world and they are widespread. Political and academic instability for many years led to a failure for palæontology to develop in Cambodia, and important fossil finds are only now being discovered. Cambodia today is not what it once was. The ancient Khmer empire used to occupy part of Thailand and a great swathe of present-day Vietnam and extended up across today’s Laos. All this is an area now known to be rich in dinosaur fossils including Stegosaurus, and fossils have been recorded at Angkor Wat, near the site of the ancient temple. There are plenty of opportunities for that temple stonecarver to have known a well-preserved fossilized stegosaur skeleton, some 700 years before that dinosaur was first revealed to scientists in the Western world.
There is a stegosaur carving at the Ta Prohm temple in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, which opened in 1186 AD. Some commentators have concluded that the plates along the back are ‘leaves’, but a fossilized skeleton may have been the inspiration.
There are other historic representations of a Stegosaurus. We can travel back across the globe and find an example in the legacy of Father Carlos Crespi Croci, born in Italy in 1891. He studied anthropology at the University of Milan, entered the priesthood, and in 1923 he was sent as a missionary to the small city of Cuenca in Ecuador. He worked tirelessly for the indigenous people, establishing an orphanage and school and helping the poor. Croci is commemorated at the church of Maria Auxiliadora in Cuenca by a statue of him assisting a little child. He died in 1982, and the local residents who knew him remember him with great affection. He also attracted global publicity with a series of curious relics, some of them allegedly coming from North Africa, and was surrounded by allegations of fakery and subterfuge. He was the subject of books and television documentaries that argued the case, and many of his objects were exhibited in a museum. A disastrous fire destroyed the building (and many of the artifacts) in 1962, and controversy has persisted ever since over the fate of the treasures that were recovered from the smoking ruins. One item in that collection, however, was a stone carving that does not seem to be a fake. It shows a creature with plates along its back like a stegosaur, and could conceivably have been inspired by a fossilized skeleton.
Fossil dinosaurs were known to the ancient people of South and Central America. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, and his Spanish troops travelled to explore Mexico in 1519, he was presented, not only with gold and precious stones, but with huge fossilized bones. Missionaries who ventured deep into Ecuador and Peru were shown excavations of fossils, and Georges Cuvier (here) referred to them as evidence of creatures now extinct. When Cortés reached Tlaxcalteca, the elders brought out some huge fossilized limb bones, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a captain under Cortés, later wrote about these bones resembling the remains of gigantic humans. He said that one thigh bone (femur) was as tall as a man, which is typical of the femur of a sauropod dinosaur. Diaz recorded that the