The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, by Adrienne Mayor (author), Donna Postel (narrator)

Tantor Media, ISBN 9781705276761, February 2021 (original publication April 2000)

I'm not sure it should really surprise me, but the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient cultures did a fair amount of paleontology.

Now, they didn't have our dating techniques, so while they had a good sense that Earth was old, and that the bones they found were from creatures that existed before us and were now gone, they had no idea how old, and didn't necessarily have a good sense of what came before what.

They also couldn't reliably tell what bones belonged with which other bones in the more jumbled and confused fossil sites. Earthquakes exposed a lot of fossils, but also jumbled them together.

Also, the Greeks found the first mastodon fossils before they ever saw their first elephants. Since mammal bones have a lot of similarity despite differences in size and detail, it was easy to interpret mammoth and mastodon bones, that they had to work out how to properly arrange, as very human-shaped giants, who were no longer present in their world.

Other remains were properly interpreted as animals, and they had to work out for themselves what these animals had looked like, and how they behaved. Though mythology played a role in how they did that, and the bones in turn fed into mythology, their descriptions of appearance and proposed or assumed behavior were often very naturalistic. Among other examples, she suggests that protoceratops fossils may have been the basis for the appearance of the mythical griffin. The protoceratops frills or their enlarged shoulder bones could have been the basis for the idea that they had wings. Greek art sometimes depicts griffins as guarding their eggs, or tending their young.

In both Greece and Rome there were also quite lively episodes of fossil theft, fossil smuggling, and fossil hoaxes that would do the livelier period of out own modern, not yet quite fully scientific, early paleontology proud. Some of the most exciting examples involve mammoth or mastodon bones presumed to be the remains of Greek cultural heroes who figured prominently in their myths.

Andrienne Mayor is an historian of ancient science and a classical folklorist, not a paleontologist. She has collaborated with paleontologists on various projects. Also, this book was originally published in 2000. This 2021 audiobook has an updated introduction, but there would be significant differences if she wrote the book today, given all the progress we've made since then--including in the realm of paleontologists, historians, and artists working together to accurately assess artistic depictions as well as Greek and Roman sources for accounts of fossil discoveries in classical times.

Nevertheless, it's a well-written, lively account of a different look at both fossils, and ancient history.