Mythical creatures entirely myth, or do you think some may have been based in reality

[Flyndaran]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Yeah. I don't believe in absolutes or that we can ever possibly know all there is to know, especially when it comes to history and especially when it comes to antiquity.

You may not know whether and how many apples I'm holding right now, but you darn well know that I'm not holding a living unicorn baby.

We may find "sea monsters", but we won't find SEA MONSTERS! Biology is amazing, but limited by physical laws that don't change for anyone.

[Red_Dazes]

You may not know whether and how many apples I'm holding right now, but you darn well know that I'm not holding a living unicorn baby.

We may find "sea monsters", but we won't find SEA MONSTERS! Biology is amazing, but limited by physical laws that don't change for anyone.

...Well you never know... if the physical laws don't change for anyone... than maybe somewhere someone IS holding a baby unicorn right now... it might just not be a UNICORN! As we think of it....

To follow the train of thought everyone has been heading towards I think that the Mythos and legends of old were mans way to explain things he could not other wise explain. Based of of things that were real to him, but that he had no words for properly. So over time the great lizard becomes the DRAGON and the elephant skull becomes some terrible giant who died... etc. Real and explainable things that got blown out of proportion because people couldn't figure out what they were looking at.


.... then again... I could be dead wrong and maybe the UNICORNS are all living under ground... or some crazy king has them captive in the SEA! *cookies for reference*

[AdminAssistant]

Physical laws don't change...but when we're discussing what was going on in the past, we can't know for sure. We can't know with 100% certainty that a species of horse with a horn on its head never existed. A lack of evidence is not proof of non-existence.

[Lace Neil Singer]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-trut...-the-internet/

Interesting read. Especially the whale skeleton.

[Mr Slugger]

But see the chupacabra is a good example of a real animal that has been turned into the myth. I mean it eats chickens, small animals, etc. But in reality, it's not exactly a wolf or a dog, it's some kind of hybrid with a skin condition. We know what it is because we can do DNA testing and stuff on it, but if you saw that 200 years ago I'm sure we'd be like WTF is that?

[Flyndaran]

But see the chupacabra is a good example of a real animal that has been turned into the myth. I mean it eats chickens, small animals, etc. But in reality, it's not exactly a wolf or a dog, it's some kind of hybrid with a skin condition. We know what it is because we can do DNA testing and stuff on it, but if you saw that 200 years ago I'm sure we'd be like WTF is that?

The word you are looking for is coyote with skin condition.
Most myths are created out of whole cloth. Not everything has to have even a grain of truth.
Thunder may have suggested sky gods, but they still don't exist even a little.

Horses with horns never existed, and don't pull that not evidence of absence crap with me. That just shows a complete ignorance of the scientific method.

Real truth discovered from hard studied science will always beat ignorant wonder any day.

[AdminAssistant]

Horses with horns never existed, and don't pull that not evidence of absence crap with me. That just shows a complete ignorance of the scientific method.

Ah, so you have a time machine and can go back to study what the world was precisely like in antiquity?

As a historian, the very first thing I have to come to grips with is the fact that nothing is certain. All I can do is take the evidence that I have, and construct what likely happened. However, I also know that it's not 100%.

Practically everyone in the known world is taught that organized theatre began in the 6th-5th century BCE. However, it's entirely possible that a good deal of theatrical activity happened in Egypt before then. We just don't have enough evidence to back up that claim. Practically everyone is taught that a mostly uneducated actor and business man from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the greatest dramatic poetry ever written in English. There is very little actual evidence to back up that claim, but because that has been what was always believed, people just tend to run with it. Fact is, we will likely never know when the exact first theatrical performance was or who really wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

So, back to your point, since we don't have any fossil evidence of unicorns or dragons, we can say that it is likely that they never existed. However, we can't completely rule out the possibility.

[BroomJockey]

don't pull that not evidence of absence crap with me. That just shows a complete ignorance of the scientific method.

Real truth discovered from hard studied science will always beat ignorant wonder any day.

Err, I think you're the one ignorant of the scientific method, and some basic tenants of logic, as well. You cannot prove a negative. You can't point to the lack of evidence of something existing as proof it never existed. After all, it takes some fairly specific circumstances for fossils to be created. Science rarely if ever uses the word "impossible." Just "exceedingly unlikely." Your certainty flies in the face of scientific convention.

[Mr Slugger]

So, back to your point, since we don't have any fossil evidence of unicorns or dragons, we can say that it is likely that they never existed. However, we can't completely rule out the possibility.

I think though something like a dragon is just a crocodile blown out of proportion, and I think that most mythical creatures are blown out of proportion to an extent. But as I said in the first post some things like a leviathan the description pretty much fits a huge squid/octopus type thing. And we know there's huge squids, we're just not sure how big they get yet because they hide. And we know that some are aggressive. So the question would be could 300 years ago before modern machinery (which seems to scare most animals) could giant squids have attacked the boats of the time?

Then of course we've got the hobbits. Which they've found skeletons of very small full grown human like creatures. Of course some say that they are some kind of advanced primate, some say they are a kind of human, or a human with a deformity. The people of that region are much smaller than normal humans even to this day so one of the thoughts is that at one point there was a population of small humans there and they've advanced into the people that live there today. Now maybe they don't full fall into the hobbit category, but if these people did exist maybe they are the origin of hobbits?

[Flyndaran]

Err, I think you're the one ignorant of the scientific method, and some basic tenants of logic, as well. You cannot prove a negative. You can't point to the lack of evidence of something existing as proof it never existed. After all, it takes some fairly specific circumstances for fossils to be created. Science rarely if ever uses the word "impossible." Just "exceedingly unlikely." Your certainty flies in the face of scientific convention.

In a way we are both right. In science, you don't try to prove the negative, you try to prove the opposite positive, and if after enormous trial you can't, it is best to assume the negative stands.
Try to prove that unicorns existed within recorded history. If after enormous trial, you can't, then it is scientifically valid to assume that they never existed.
Yes, it will always remain vaguely possible, in that all things are technically possible, to say that they just magically avoided all detection, but that is not the most likely occurance.
If you believe that unicorns existed despite the completel lack of evidence, then you must believe things like smoking DOESN'T casue cancer, because it is technically possible that all those test subjects just happened to get cancer anyway. See how silly that is?

[MergedLoki]

Personally, I'd love it if say, dragons had been based on reality. They're one of those creatures that keeps showing up in different cultures, though changed between. They always seem to be large flying lizards, however, despite other differences. That'd point to at least some base creature out there. Maybe a distant cousin of dinosaurs, or some such. However, I think that while many creatures do have some base creature that was probably a genetic freak accident, or was half-glimpsed and then shaped, twisted, and grew through the telling, the physical reality would resemble nothing of the stories.

I watched a whole discovery channel special a few years back that actually gave a fairly logical reasoning that dragons HAD at one point exsisted and how they died out.

(basically an ice age and low numbers if i remember correctly... i saw it a good 6 years back now).

but it was very cool and interesting as it attempted to approach the topic from a totally fact/science based point of view.

and i'm sure SOME mythilogical creatures have a basis, somewhere in fact (albiet a twisted re-telling of story's etc.) and some are total hogwash and made up.

but that guy umm.. Oberon Zell Ravenheart 'created' a unicorn sometime in the 60's and/or 70's. (i don't remember how but there's pictures and it's been authenticated as real) basically bred a horse or pony or something selectively and yes this damn thing had a lump of bone growing from it's forehead so yes it looked like a unicorn. Now who's to say this couldn't haev just happened randomly in nature as mutations DO happen (it's why we evolve and change).

someone saw it had never seen anything LIKE it before decided 'omg this new and UNIQUE being must surely be magical' and bam. unicorn myth.

[Flyndaran]

...
but that guy umm.. Oberon Zell Ravenheart 'created' a unicorn sometime in the 60's and/or 70's. (i don't remember how but there's pictures and it's been authenticated as real) basically bred a horse or pony or something selectively and yes this damn thing had a lump of bone growing from it's forehead so yes it looked like a unicorn. Now who's to say this couldn't haev just happened randomly in nature as mutations DO happen (it's why we evolve and change).

someone saw it had never seen anything LIKE it before decided 'omg this new and UNIQUE being must surely be magical' and bam. unicorn myth.

Except that it's only more recent myths that have unicorns looking anything like a horse. The earliest descriptions are more akin to real world rhinos.

People have forced animals to do or be things unlike anything nature ever produced. Grasping at straws to make myths real is a bit kooky in my book.

But I do remember when the mythical gilled deer was found. Its nose has slit nostrils vaguely reminescent of gills. It is a very small deer, so it had a chance at hiding in the modern world in a very forested area.

How about the STD that sometimes afflicts animals such as rabbits. It causes horny growths around the head, that sometimes look like antlers.

I like speculation, but I prefer at least some real science in it to truly consider it plausable or likely.

[Mr Slugger]

but that guy umm.. Oberon Zell Ravenheart 'created' a unicorn sometime in the 60's and/or 70's. (i don't remember how but there's pictures and it's been authenticated as real) basically bred a horse or pony or something selectively and yes this damn thing had a lump of bone growing from it's forehead so yes it looked like a unicorn. Now who's to say this couldn't haev just happened randomly in nature as mutations DO happen (it's why we evolve and change).

someone saw it had never seen anything LIKE it before decided 'omg this new and UNIQUE being must surely be magical' and bam. unicorn myth.

Well I would say if I saw this http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...icorns-are-re/ out in the woods a couple hundred years ago I would go unicorn too.

[gremcint]

An article in Muse Magazine (a science and arts magazine for kids that I had a subscription to when i was a kid) suggested that the concept of cyclopes could have been a result of someone seeing an elephant skull without knowing what an actual elephant looked like (like if one had been washed across the Mediterranean). They might have mistaken the trunk-hole for a single giant eye socket, and interpreted the actual eye sockets on the side of the skull as ear holes.

This is second hand from my sister who is a grad student currently writing a paper on homer, the original cyclops in Homer's story actually had two eyes.
But there are plenty of stories where there is only one. Just a random fact.


I know we're talking in reallife but in the show primeval where portals randomly open in time and space at one point they begin to theorize that mythological creatures could just be displaced prehistoric and futuristic creatures.

[Flyndaran]

I watched a whole discovery channel special a few years back that actually gave a fairly logical reasoning that dragons HAD at one point exsisted and how they died out.

....

Missed this post first time around.
That for ENTERTAINMENT only program was laughable in its pathetic attempt at scientific explanation.
It came up with a ludicrous hydrogen production for flight and fire.
Ludicrous, because of the ridiculous amount of energy required to make usable quantities, and the sheer volume required for buoyancy. It would have to have a hard to move hot air balloon sized ass to fly very very slowly.
Also. hydrogen burns with a faint blue tinge.

The discovery channel has a piss poor record for rational speculation.