Finding dinosaur bones is not something that is exactly common, but it isn’t unheard of either. Today, most old dinosaur fossils are found by professionals who know where to look, but regular people and construction workers find them from time to time as well.

This may make you wonder about what people throughout history thought of these types of bones when they were found. Dinosaurs, after all, have only been a theory for about 150 years, and our more scientific understanding of them is much more recent than that.

Well, the way that humans throughout history thought about these fossils is very interesting and surprisingly well documented. Historian Adrienne Mayor from Stanford University has researched this extensively and is the author of the book, “The First Fossil Hunters, and she recently spoke with IFLScience about some of the different ways that these bones were understood. To start with, she discussed how they were looked at by ancient Greeks and Romans:

“There is plentiful evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans recognized the biological nature of not only small invertebrate fossils such as shells, but they understood that the enormous fossil bones of extinct mammals had belonged to immense creatures that flourished in the deep past and then disappeared en masse. They perceived that the fossils were extremely old, from the remote past when mountains and seas were being formed, before the current human era.”

This understanding of the fact that many animals lived and later went extinct was much more complex than many would assume today. She went on:

“They understood ‘extinction’ because they knew that the creatures whose bones they found no longer existed but vanished in some catastrophe in the deep past.”

There was also a lot of belief that associated these bones with monsters from their mythology. For example, in the 7th century BCE, Aristeas, a Greek Poet, wrote about the Griffin, which is still a popular mythical creature today. At the time, however, it was widely believed that this was a real animal, and that was at least partly backed up by the findings of bones. Mayor explains:

“Many other classical Greek and Roman writers added details to the Scythian legend, such as Griffin eggs in nests on the ground along the routes to gold deposits. From Herodotus to the natural historian Aelian, roughly 1,000 years later, the Griffin of the eastern deserts was thought to be a real animal, but no one ever claimed to see a live Griffin.”

She suggests in her book that the idea of the Griffin was based on dinosaur bones from the Protoceratops, which lived in the Late Cretaceous period. This dinosaur did indeed have some similarities to a Griffin in that it walked on four legs and may have had what appeared to be a beak and wings.

Another example of this is the legend of the Cyclops, which is a giant one-eyed ogre. Mayor explains that this may have come from fossils of mammoths or other large animals:

“Again, we cannot say whether discoveries of fossil mammoth or other prehistoric elephant skulls inspired the myth of a one-eyed ogre called the Cyclops. All we can say is that when people who did not know about living elephants, like the Greeks in the time of Homer, came across a mammoth skull, it would be plausible for them to think that the central hole was an eye socket and perhaps visualize a one-eyed giant.”

These are just some of the more well-documented examples of what our ancestors believed about the fossils that they found. There are also many stories of even older humans being buried with fossils that modern researchers believe were used in some type of superstitious ritual.

One thing we can say for sure is that humans have always been interested in these ancient bones and the animals that left them behind.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.