5 Mythical Creatures That (Kinda) Actually Existed | Answers With Joe

there's a lot we know about the universe and the world around us but we also keep learning new stuff all the time like did you know we only have explored five percent of the oceans and we keep finding new species every year in fact last year in 2020 the california academy of sciences added 213 new plant and animal species to their tree of life they include 101 ants 22 crickets 15 fishes 11 geckos 11 sea slugs 11 flowering plants eight beetles eight fossil econoderms seven spiders five snakes two skinks two aphids two eels one moss one frog one fossil amphibian one sea horse one fossil scallop one sea biscuit and one fossil sea lily and one coral and one partridge in a pear tree okay so now imagine you were living in ancient times and you ran across the skeletal remains of an animal and you didn't know what we now know about all the different species around the world or maybe you heard about an animal third hand from some traveler you're trying to make sense of what you're seeing or what you're hearing with the limited amount of knowledge that you have so you do what humans are great at you justify you create a story you develop a myth you find a reason for this thing to have the appearance that it has and that's not necessarily a bad thing it might give you comfort or entertainment or religious guidance or moral support the legends and myths that we've built around mythical creatures serve a purpose or at least they once did today we can easily take a look and and try to figure out exactly what it was that they were looking at and created these myths around this isn't just fun and interesting it also helps us to understand cultures around the world and gives us a little insight into what makes humans the way we are [Music] for this episode i want to look at mythical beasts that were based on real life animals and in some cases real life animals that were once considered mythical beasts so some of these animals were were totally legit animals that we know very well today and then others were maybe just kind of conjured up after seeing a few skeletal remains a few skeletons and an endless imagination can go a long way and i'm going to rate them on what i'm calling the underwear scale in the sense that an old pair of underwear stretches a lot whereas a new pair of underwear might be a bit more tight so basically the more of a stretch the explanation is the older the underwear you get it because science the first creature on our list is dragons daenerys road one king ghidorah fought godzilla puff was magical yep we're going to talk about dragons those mythical beasts that fill our fairy tales and fantasies interestingly almost every culture around the world has some kind of legend about dragons in their history the first appearances of it came up in mesopotamian and greek writings for example the moosh kashu is a scaly dragon with feline four legs eagle talons and hind legs a tail a long neck a horned head and a serpentine tongue that appears in the ishtar gate in the city of babylon from the 6th century bce in the bible there's a leviathan a sea serpent that spits fire from its mouth king agamemnon and the iliad is a blue dragon on his shield because of their serpent-type bodies dragons are often perceived as representing evil or at least in the middle eastern and western worlds in some eastern asian myths dragons are beneficent creatures representing heaven and masculinity no matter which culture they appear in dragons are almost always reptilian anthropologist david e jones suggests in his book an instinct for dragons that it's an amalgam of three primal fears snakes predatory birds and big cats now another mythological creature that includes two of those fears anyway is the griffin it's a mixture of a lion and an eagle it's often depicted with the back legs body and tail of a lion and the head of an eagle some griffins have wings and eagle towns on their four feet while others don't since it was one part king of all beasts and one part king of all birds it was sort of king of all creatures entirely griffins are found in mythologies around the world from the middle east and northern europe and they're known to guard treasures and tombs some legends say their feathers can cure blindness but were dragons and griffins real if you were a scythian living near the black sea in ancient times then yes at least if you ran across their skeletal remains skeletal remains that today we would recognize as the bones of a protoceratops protoceratops was a sheep-sized herbivore from the cretaceous period that would look very familiar to people like us that were brought up on jurassic park but if you were back in ancient times and you had no concept of deep time and no idea what dinosaurs were and you ran across bones that looked like this i could see it i could see it at least that's hypothesis put forth by adrienne mayer a folklorist and historian of ancient science at stanford university i mean the modern field of paleontology is only a couple hundred years old but those bones didn't just show up 200 years ago they've been there this whole time so yeah it's it's not unfeasible to think that somebody in ancient times might have run across those bones and come to some pretty interesting conclusions not everyone agrees with this hypothesis though like dr mark whitton who believed that the greeks came up with their version of griffins from living animals and not fossils waden wrote in 2016 the fact that living animal anatomies can easily account for all elements of ancient griffin depictions there seems no need to invoke protoceratops as part of griffin anatomy the mainstream view of griffins being simple chameras of living animals has to be considered a far simpler and thus more likely interpretation of their form for whitten griffins were just a product of our human imagination there are other theories like whale bones in the past may have also been mistaken as proof of dragons before people knew what they were actually looking at and then there are other animals like the nile crocodile which may have lived in a wider geographic area in ancient times it's the largest crocodile species with adults measuring up to six meters long and weighing almost up to one ton also it can do this thing that they call a high walk where it walks with its trunk off the ground and when it walks towards you when it lumbers towards you and to some people you know that could be interpreted as a type of dragon the gowana is a species of monitor lizards found in australia they're predators with razor sharp teeth and claws and can grow up to two meters long they also have venom glands can climb trees and can quickly sprint on their hind legs so it's thought that in australia that might be a source for dragon folklore finally there's another type of monitor lizard that could be a candidate for the source of dragon myths in fact it's considered such a likely possibility that well they actually named it a dragon the komodo dragon in indonesia is an apex predator first discovered by europeans in 1910. they're the world's largest living lizards and can reach up to three meters in length and weigh an average of 70 kilograms they have long tails agile necks and their tongues are forked in yellow couple of fun facts about the komodo dragon when it's threatened it can throw up its stomach contents to reduce its weight in order to flee komodos also cannibalize their young so young komodos often roll around in fecal matter coating themselves in a scent that adult komodos are wired to avoid a vomit-spewing poop-smelling beast cool dragon but in terms of the underwear scale uh how likely is it that dragons were based off of living creatures um i'd probably say it's a pretty good fit it's not that much of a stretch considering that there were dragon legends all around the world and there are lizards all around the world so i'd put it at i'd say maybe like brand new boxer briefs next up is the cyclops the singer shev wooley scored a hit in 1958 with a song about a cyclops specifically about a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater that came to earth and wanted to join a rock band and ziggy stardust thought that he was the first alien rock star you don't even eat people ziggy do better by the way i've always wondered is it a purple people eater or is it a purple people eater because if it's the latter he probably would have been really hungry unless he found the blue few gates of kentucky any fish cyclops are featured in greek mythology most notably by the poet's homer and hissid in homer's odyssey the hero of the story odysseus encounters a cyclops named polyphemus who's the son of poseidon polyphemus lives in a cave raises sheep and eats men in the story he devours several of odysseus's men before the hero and the rest of his crew escape using trickery and wine you know that old trick of getting somebody drunk and then stabbing them in their one eye that thing in hessia's theogony the cyclops and the titans were the offspring of gaia and uranus uranus kept all the children in prison inside gaia but cronus a titan successfully overthrew his father with cyclops help and their reward for helping cronus imprison the cyclops in the greek underworld but then they helped zeus the son of cronus overthrow his father and become the ultimate ruler of the cosmos i remember that soap opera one meaning of the word cyclops is circle eye and the creature is always depicted as a person with only one eye in the center of their forehead so could an animal be responsible for the cyclops legend so like many ancient creatures the greeks understood their world through myth building if they found something in nature that they couldn't explain they created a myth around it to explain how that came to be and why the world is the way that it is according to thomas strasser a professor of ancient art and archaeology at providence college in an interview with national geographic quote the idea that mythology explains the natural world is an old idea the ancient greeks were farmers and would certainly come across fossil bones like this and try to explain them with no concept of evolution it makes sense that they would reconstruct them in their minds as giants monsters sphinxes and so on so that's the basis for one hypothesis around the cyclops austrian paleontologist ethenio abel came up with the idea in 1914 that the greeks came up with the cyclops myth based off of prehistoric dwarf elephant skulls why because they look like this they were first found on the islands of crete cypress and sicily and they're about twice the size of a human skull and so it's easy oh my god yeah yeah i see it i see it that's not an eye socket by the way that's essential nasal cavity for the trunk but again if you're an ancient greek dude and you run across this in a cave somewhere i mean yeah i could i could see why you would think that after you clean your toga another possibility is the dynatherium gigantium whose fossils were also discovered on crete it was one of the world's largest animals to ever walk the earth measuring 4.6 meters tall at the shoulder and displaying tusks that were 1.3 meters long the animal is a distant relative to today's elephants but unlike the modern elephant the down ethereum's tossed screw out of its lower jaw and curve downward and back up instead of up and out and it also had a cavity in its skull for its pronounced trunk or to paraphrase shed wooly song maybe that's where it was playing rock and roll out of the hole in its head so the underwear scale for this one i mean the cyclops is a greek creature a greek myth and these bones were found on greek islands and i can see it that that looks like something that would only have one eye and i yeah i'm gonna give this one some tiny whities next up is the kraken it could devour an entire ship's crew with one bite it was 1600 meters long it was so big that many crew members would mistake it for an island and when it wanted to feed it would emit a strong and peculiar scent which may have just been poop i'm talking about the crack and the largest and scariest ocean creature man's ever invented the earliest known mentioned the kraken comes from king sparrow in norway in 1180 when he listed it as one of several sea monsters lurking in the waters around greenland and norway a 13th century icelandic saga called orovar odor mentioned a mythical creature too named the huff goofa with a description strikingly similar to the kraken and over time the kraken myth became more and more terrifying carlinius the father of modern taxonomy even included it in his first edition of systema nature in 1735. then in 1853 an animal washed ashore on a danish beach naturalist japanese steamstroke took the animal's beak and scientifically described it as a giant squid archetypius ducks squids are one of four types of cephalopods which are considered to be very intelligent you know what else is intelligent uh my previous episode on cephalopods it's just a it's a phenomenon of writing it's so good that aaron sorkin yes that aaron sorkin called me up after he saw it and said that he was not going to do his master class anymore because after seeing that video he knew that he was a sham writer whoever wrote that episode is just it's just the greatest writer ever i had to put aaron on hold though because i got a call from phoebe wallerbridge who wanted to take the same idea and turn it into a movie or maybe a limited series about a squid that helps a detective solve marine based crimes and call it crack in the case i'll put the cephalopod episode link down the description below if you want to watch it and yes jason wrote this script too so was the giant squid the creature that these sailors had mythologized all those years ago based on its size probably so because not only is giant squid quite large but they're also rarely seen which kind of helps build the myth around them the largest giant squid ever documented by scientists was 13 meters long and probably weighed more than a ton and because they do mostly live in the lowest depths of the ocean where there's very little light down there they have gigantic eyes they're 30 centimeters across they have they have eyes the size of dinner plates in 2005 two japanese researchers photographed narcotis swimming 900 meters deep off the oge sawara islands in the north pacific ocean and in 2012 oceanographer either witter filmed the first footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat it was absolutely breathtaking and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended it would have been as tall as a two-story house but as i said at the beginning of this video only five percent of the ocean has been explored so the cracking could be explained as a giant squid or maybe there's something bigger going on down there there is by the way another species of squig called the colossal squid which has more mass than a giant squid but isn't as long as a giant squid in terms of the underwear scale on this one it's pretty tight i think this one's pretty locked in and it's aquatic so speedos next up is gorillas africa is a huge continent it's got creatures tall and small and we're still finding new ones all the time and back in the day there were stories of this huge animal human-like hairy creature with a bad temper that european explorers would come back to europe and regale with tales of of this crazy man beast that they found in the jungle of africa audiences would ooh and ah about it and scientists would just dismiss the story as nonsense this creature was the gorilla the first reported gorilla sighting from outside of africa was from hanoi the navigator a 5th century carthaginian explorer after arriving in a bay called the horn of the south he found an island populated with what he called savages supposedly his crew tried to chase them down but they weren't able to catch any of them because the males were able to climb up trees and they threw rocks at the crew actually they were able to catch a few females who bit and clawed at them but over time they got to be cool with each other and they all lived happily ever after no of course they flayed and killed the gorillas and took their skins back to carthage the next known sighting took place in the 16th century when british explorer andrew battell visited parts of west africa he described the animals as hairy monsters that look like humans that were completely vegetarian but still the gorilla was considered a myth by western scientists until the mid-1800s that's when american physician and missionary thomas s savage found some gorilla bones in liberia and had them shipped back home he partnered with jeffrey's wyman who was an anatomist at harvard to examine the bones in more detail and then they presented their findings of the boston society of natural history in 1847. the scientific name that they gave to it was troglodytes gorilla which was sort of a nod to hano's discovery back in the 5th century because the word gorilla in greek stands for tribe of hairy women it would be another decade before paul di cherub became the first european explorer to see a living gorilla but yeah gorillas once upon a time where a cryptozoological thing they were on the same level as sasquatch which is something that sasquatch enthusiasts love to point to i also feel like it needs to be noted that gorillas were only a myth to europeans the african natives that lived there were well aware of their existence so if i'm going to put this one on an underwear scale i mean it can't get any tighter than that we know it's a real thing so i mean a thong and last but not least is a saino safali the andaman islands are located in the bay of bengal in the northeastern indian ocean and according to explorer marco polo a curious creature lived on the islands essay wrote in his essay travels quote i assure you that all the men of this island of umagandian have heads like dogs and teeth and eyes likewise in fact in the face they are all just like big mastiff dogs he described them as living on quote flesh and rice and milk and that they would eat everybody that they came across interestingly he wasn't the only person who described a race of people with dog heads around 400 bce the greek physician cesius who also wrote about unicorns wrote about men and women in india quote whose clothing is the skin of wild beasts and who bark like dogs herodotus claimed to have seen them in libya alexander the great said that he fought them in india pliny the elder included them in his book natural history writing that quote they live by hunting and catching birds the chinese buddhist missionary hui shen said that he spotted them on an island east of fusang in 499 a.d and according to legend saint christopher was a man with a dog's head who wanted to be a human and eventually got his wish so what the hell was the sinus of folly like what creature could have possibly inspired this idea one theory is that they could have been baboons or macaques whose long faces kind of give them the appearance similar to that of a dog another theory suggested by bernard huevelmans in his 1955 book on the track of unknown animals is that in africa anyway they may be from sightings of an injury lemur the injury is a large species of lemur and he suggested that they could look like a tiny human with a big doghead in his book he wrote quote three feet high with no tail but an inconspicuous stump the injuries isn't astonishingly like a man and outline like other lemurs or half monkeys it has a fine and pointed muzzle which makes its head more like a foxes or a dog's he also speculated that the lion-tailed macaque or wanderoo as it's called could explain the legends in india even sir david attenborough suggested that the injury could be an explanation for the sign of safali in his 1961 docu-series zoo quest the proportions of their body with their very long legs were strangely human and i remembered once again marco polo's dog-headed men so yeah ancient myths they all come from somewhere and i gotta be honest i did not see some of these explanations coming when i started working on this video this is just a handful of them of course if there's any that you're a big fan of that i didn't cover here just talk about it down in the comments below and there is an extra version of this on nebula if you're subscribed there so if you're anything like me the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is you pick up your phone and you start scrolling and if you're anything like me 90 of what you scroll through is hot garbage because the world is 90 hot garbage there's got to be a better way wouldn't it be great if there was a service that boils down the information of the day into quick easily digestible nuggets that you could just read and then get started with your day there is exactly 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 598,045

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: FNC6RfhKDi0

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021