Centaur 'skeleton' takes science center stage
— -- A centaur and a cyclops, a griffin and a unicorn — and their bones — not the usual stuff of science exhibits.
All the same, the bones of the "Centaur of Tymfi" stands proudly on display at Tucson's International Wildlife Museum in a just-opened exhibit. Nearby is the skull of a "griffin," a legendary flying lion with an eagle's skull, and the noggin of a "cyclops," the one-eyed giant of Greek myth. Taking center stage is the centaur, designed by sculptor and zoologist Bill Willers of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
Entitled "Mythological Wildlife," the exhibit aims to make folks think about how we know what is real, says museum director Richard White. A paleontologist, White says the exhibit also looks at how folklore might hold a few hidden scientific stories.
"Once upon a time, mythology was science," White says, accepted as part of the natural history world as perceived by the ancients. The ancient Greek poet, Hesiod, wrote about centaurs around 700 BC. Herodotus, "The Father of Historians," wrote about griffins around 500 B.C. "It's legitimate for museums to display mythological creatures to make people question what is real and what is science today."
A shadowy corner of scholarship called " cryptozoology," filled with folks looking for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, has put these sort of questions into disrepute. But scholars such as Stanford University's Adrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, have opened wide questions about what folklore has to offer science today.
For the exhibit, for example, the "cyclops" skull on display takes its cue from the suggestion that the skull of a prehistoric elephant called a mastodon, tipped on its side, might have resembled the skull of a one-eyed giant to the ancients, including a Roman emperor who perhaps kept a mastodon skull on display. A horn-faced dinosaur called Protoceratops, may have partly inspired the unicorn.
"Someone saw a man on a horseback perhaps, and couldn't explain it," White says. "To him, the hypothesis was that it was a centaur. Now we know better. But there are still many things we struggle to explain, even today."
Looking at the scientific origins of legends isn't a new idea, notes art professor Beauvais Lyons of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who points out that New York's American Museum of Natural History ran a "Mythic Creatures" exhibit so popular it was extended from 2006 until 2008. And the renowned Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has for decades blended real natural science with flights of biographical fantasy.
Lyons heads the " Hokes Archives" (as in hoax) at his university, "devoted to the fabrication and documentation of rare and unusual cultural artifacts." The university brought "The Centaur of Volos," created by Willers in 1980, to the university's John C. Hodges Library. Instead of a standing centaur, the Volos display is of a centaur half-excavated from the ground in classic archaeological museum fashion.
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