Tales of fantastical beasts and supernatural beings are as old as human history. From werewolves and vampires to yetis and deep-sea monsters, mythical creatures have inspired countless folk tales and works of culture – not to mention some elaborate hoaxes.
They have also driven many intrepid explorers into the wilderness, in the hope of gathering definitive proof of the existence of such beings. Several have been identified as real species, some have been confirmed as fiction, and still others remain the subject of passionate debate.
Creatures not yet described by science are known as cryptids – denoting their ‘hidden’ status – and the study of these mysterious animals is cryptozoology. But what’s the real science behind mythical creatures?
Vampires
Vampires have been depicted many times in literature, film and television. But scientists have speculated that the legend originated in one of several very real medical conditions.
The most commonly cited is porphyria, a rare group of disorders that cause irregularities in the production of haem (or heme), a molecule found in blood. Porphyria leads to the build-up of toxins in the skin, rendering sufferers sensitive to light and causing deterioration of the lips and gums, possibly explaining portrayals of vampires as fanged or facially disfigured.
Another suggestion is that descriptions of vampires echo some symptoms experienced by people suffering from tuberculosis, including pale skin and blood around the mouth. Tuberculosis is highly contagious, perhaps leading to the belief that vampirism is transmitted by drinking blood.
However, there are some people that think the vampire legend resulted from misunderstandings and fears about death and decomposition. The skin contracts after death, creating the illusion that hair and fingernails continue to grow. Some real animals – including vampire bats and leeches – do feed on blood, though there’s little evidence that these creatures inspired the myth.
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The Yeti
The centuries-old legend of a large, two-legged hairy creature with huge feet roaming the Himalayas has long captured the imaginations of explorers and cryptozoologists around the world.
An ape-like glacier spirit appears in myths of the Lepcha people indigenous to Nepal, Bhutan and northeast India. But the yeti achieved global notoriety in the early 20th century when sightings were reported by British mountaineers, some of whom obtained specimens of fur, bone and skin. Modern science has debunked the claims that these samples came from yetis, however.
DNA analyses in 2014 and 2017 found that alleged yeti specimens, in fact, belonged to brown bears, black bears, polar bears and other – very real – mammals.
Sea serpents
Tales of giant sea serpents date back to antiquity, but became increasingly common when Europeans began exploring the oceans more widely in the 15th century. Scientists think that a good candidate for the source of such stories is the giant oarfish, the world’s largest bony fish, which can grow up to 8m (26ft) long and has a habit of swimming vertically.
Found in temperate and tropical waters, this giant fish spends most of its life in the deep ocean, coming to the surface only during times of stress. Some reports suggest that oarfish ascend in response to seismic activity before an earthquake or tsunami, which could explain the myth that sea serpents are harbingers of doom.
Another possible explanation for sea serpent sighting is that accounts described marine animals entangled in fishing gear, writhing around while attempting to free themselves. A fishing
rope or net might, in such circumstances, look like the long, coiled body of a serpent.
The griffin
Legends of a strange, winged creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle date back to the 7th century BC in Central Asia.
It’s been suggested that the inspiration for this mythical creature, which was said to guard golden treasures, came from early discoveries of dinosaur fossils.
One mooted species was Protoceratops, a beaked dinosaur that lived in Asia between 75 and
71 million years ago. Its fossilised bones were uncovered by Scythian gold miners in the Gobi Desert around 2,000 years ago. But descriptions of the griffin predate these finds.
The Kraken
A giant, octopus-like creature that wrecks ships, the kraken originated in Scandinavian folklore around the turn of the 18th century, but tales of enormous tentacled beasts have long been told around the world.
In this case, reality isn’t so far from myth: two species of enormous, deep-ocean-dwelling squid have been discovered that may explain the origin of the tales.
The giant squid, which can grow to 13m (42ft) long, was first described by scientists in the late 19th century, while the colossal squid, discovered in the early 20th century, grows to around 10m (32ft).
Living at such great depths, these creatures are difficult to study and relatively little is known about their habits, although analysis of their stomach contents has revealed that they hunt fish and smaller squid, not sailors. Their main predators are sperm whales, and sucker marks on living whales hint at epic battles between cephalopods and cetaceans.
Despite their large size, such squid are unlikely to have the ability or inclination to attack large vessels. Even so, it’s easy to understand why seeing one of these beasts would strike fear into the hearts of sailors.
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- The bizarre (and pretty gross) science of whale vomit
- What is the difference between a squid and an octopus?
- Meet the vampire squid, a glowing deep-sea creature that pretends to be a pineapple
Mermaids
Strange, often beautiful aquatic creatures with human torsos and fish-like tails have appeared in folklore for millennia.
The myth may have originated in Syria around 1000 BC in the form of Atargatis, a fertility goddess who jumped into a lake and turned into a fish.
Much later, European sailors exploring the high seas in the 15th century returned with reports of mermaid sightings. Christopher Columbus’s description of a mermaid near what’s now Haiti in 1493 suggests the real animals these explorers probably encountered were “not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits”.
The creatures such sailors saw were most likely manatees and dugongs – large, herbivorous marine mammals also known as sea cows. Growing about 3-4m (9-13ft) long, they sometimes rise above the surface by ‘standing’ on their tails.
Another factor possibly contributing to sailors’ visions was scurvy. Symptoms of this disease that afflicted seafarers on long voyages, and which is caused by vitamin C deficiency, include hallucinations. Combine lonely sailors with scurvy-induced visions and a roughly human-sized marine mammal, and you can imagine how tales of mermaids might have evolved.
The minotaur
In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man, which lived underground at the centre of a maze called the Labyrinth.
The story in its earliest form dates back to the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation on the island of Crete. However, the depiction of the Minotaur as a human-bull hybrid came later; it was originally described simply as a rage-filled beast that lived below ground and caused destruction above.
This gives us a clue to the origin of the Minotaur, which could have provided an explanation for devastating earthquakes. Crete lies directly above a major subduction zone – a region where one tectonic plate slides beneath another, causing tremors. The island is on the small Aegean Plate, which is being lifted as the much larger African Plate subducts beneath it.
As a result, Crete has been subjected to many major earthquakes. Such seismic activity may have spawned the myth of the Minotaur – long before the science of tectonics developed.
Unicorns
Often portrayed as a white horse with a single, spiral horn sprouting from its forehead, the unicorn is one of the most famous mythical creatures. The earliest depictions of unicorns date from around 3300 BC in South Asia, and were probably based on aurochs, an extinct two-horned wild ox.
A 3rd-century BC mistranslation of the Hebrew word for aurochs (or possibly oryx), re’em, to the Greek word monokeros, ‘one horn’, might explain how the later unicorn myth originated.
The legend gained traction in the Middle Ages when sailors brought tusks to Europe and sold them as unicorn horns. In fact, such horns invariably came from narwhals, a medium-sized whale with a single tusk – actually an elongated, spiral-growing canine tooth – up to 3m long.
Five famous monster hoaxes
1. Bigfoot
In 1958, a local newspaper reported the discovery of giant footprints in Bluff Creek, California, attributed to a Bigfoot (or Sasquatch). The footprints were created as a prank by Ray Wallace – a fact revealed by his son only after his death in 2002. The famous footage of a ‘Bigfoot’ (above) shot by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, released in 1967, was also shot in Bluff Creek.
2. The Fiji mermaid
In 1822, American sea captain Samuel Barrett returned from a voyage with a mummified mermaid, which was displayed in New York, Boston and London. It turned out to be a composite created by Japanese fishermen, with the head and torso of a monkey sewn onto a fish’s body and tail.
3. The Loch Ness monster
A photo of the Loch Ness Monster taken by British surgeon Colonel Robert Wilson in 1934 was shown to be a hoax 60 years later. The photo was faked using a plastic head and neck fixed to a toy submarine.
4. The Cardiff giant
In 1869, construction workers uncovered a 3m (9ft) tall, 1,300kg (2,800lb) ‘petrified man’ on a farm in Cardiff, New York. The so-called Cardiff Giant was created by George Hull, who commissioned the stone man to be sculpted out of gypsum and buried, so that workers he’d hired to dig a well could unearth it. He confessed to the fakery later that year.
5. The Cottingley Fairies
Photos taken by cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in Cottingley, Yorkshire, in the early 20th century seemed to show the girls with fairies. The pictures were met with both awe and scepticism. But over 60 years later, the pair admitted the fairies were paper cut-outs from a children’s book.
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