The First Fossil Hunters PDF Download. Download free ebook of The First Fossil Hunters in PDF format or read online by Adrienne Mayor 9780691089775 Published on 2001 by Princeton University Press
Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants--these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground. Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology. As Peter Dodson writes in his Foreword, |Paleontologists, classicists, and historians as well as natural history buffs will read this book with the greatest of delight--surprises abound.|
This Book was ranked at 7 by Google Books for keyword Paleontology.
Book ID of The First Fossil Hunters's Books is MXCQKJwLGS4C, Book which was written by Adrienne Mayor have ETAG "J9qK3c/f9Mk"
Book which was published by Princeton University Press since 2001 have ISBNs, ISBN 13 Code is 9780691089775 and ISBN 10 Code is 0691089779
Reading Mode in Text Status is true and Reading Mode in Image Status is true
Book which have "361 Pages" is Printed at BOOK under CategoryHistory
Book was written in en
eBook Version Availability Status at PDF is true and in ePub is true
Book Preview
Download The First Fossil Hunters PDF Free
Download The First Fossil Hunters Books Free
Download The First Fossil Hunters Free
Download The First Fossil Hunters PDF
Download The First Fossil Hunters Books
No comments:
Post a Comment