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NATIVE AMERICAN FOSSIL LEGENDS
collected by Adrienne Mayor
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Native American discoveries and ideas about fossils, from tiny shells to dinosaur bones, from 1520 to the present, gathered from more than 45 tribes in North and South America, including Aztec, Inca, Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Zuni, Yaqui, Crow, Sioux, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Comanche, Osage, Cheyenne, Iroquois, Delaware, Shawnee, and many more.
FOSSIL LEGENDS OF THE FIRST AMERICANS
by Adrienne Mayor (Princeton, 2005)
"Engaging, enlightening, and most of all, educationally entertaining"
Jack Horner (Digging Dinosaurs)
"Courageous, well-researched book, asking piercing questions"
Vine Deloria, Jr (Red Earth, White Lies)
"This is one fascinating new book on a subject not tackled before"
Prehistoric Times
"Mayor has absolutely done it again!"
Peter Dodson (Horned Dinosaurs)
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FOSSIL LEGENDS OF THE FIRST AMERICANS
excerpt in Natural History magazine (May 2005)
featured in "Myths and Fossils" Exhibit
The Netherlands, 2006
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Turok, Son of Stone, the comic book series about Plains Indians in a lost valley of time where dinosaurs still lived, enchanted many Native American kids and future fossil hunters in the 1950s and 60s. (Images copyright Dell Comics)
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Water Monsters of the Badlands
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"At one time in history, the Great Water Spirits, the Unktehi, were trying to defeat the Lightning and Thunder Spirits. The Thunder Beings decided to combine their powers to defeat the Unktehi, their enemies. The fiery bolts consumed the forest and the plains. The waters where the Unktehi lived boiled and then dried up. All the Unktehi, big and small, burned and died, leaving only their dried bones in the Badlands, where the bones turned to rocks."
--traditional Lakota Sioux interpretation of fossils, Journey Museum, Rapid City, South Dakota, written by Birgil Kills Straight (Pine Ridge Reservation) and Ronnie Theisz (Black Hills State Univ, Spearfish).
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Aztec Traditions
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When Hernando Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Yucatan, Mexico, in 1519, chiefs of Tlascala in the Aztec Kingdom showed them gigantic bones. One of Cortes's men, Bernal Diaz, recorded the words of the elders. "They said that their ancestors had told them that the bones belonged to giant men and women who had once dwelled in Yucatan. These giants were evil with wicked habits and the ancestors had to fight and overcome them before settling in Tlascala. Any of the giants that remained all died out." Bernal Diaz measured himself next to one of the giant femurs: "To show us how big these giants had been the chiefs brought out a leg-bone, which was very thick. I stood next to it and it was as tall as I am and I am of reasonable height. They showed us other big bones, mostly rotten and eaten away by the soil." Diaz writes "We were all astonished by the sight of these bones and were certain that there must have once been giants in this land." The is the earliest preserved tradition about fossils in the Americas.
Hernando Cortez sent his men to find other giant bones around the Aztec capital (now Mexico City).Yucatan has rich mastodon and mammoth fossils. The Aztec legend offered an alternative to the biblical legend that was generally accepted at that time in Europe, that such bones had belonged to giant victims of Noah's flood.
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Unktehi, the horned water monster, had a backbone like a saw
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artwork copyright Ed Heck 2004
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Delaware and Shawnee Stories of Mammoth Bones
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In 1762, John Wright of Kentucky talked with several Shawnee about big skeletons found along the Ohio River. The Shawnee said the bones belonged to an immense animal, the " grandfather of all buffalo," and that they had been hunted by "great men" of the distant past. But after all those supermen died out, the Great Spirit destroyed the enormous animals with lightning so that they wouldn't harm smaller men of the present day. The Delaware elders told Thomas Jefferson a similar story, only they claimed that the gigantic animals were driving away smaller game, like deer and bear. This angered their god, who blasted the massive animals with lightning bolts. Only their petrified remains could be seen today, although it was possible that some had escaped to the far north. Jefferson hoped that Lewis and Clark would discover living specimens of the fossil mammoths so abundant along the Ohio River.
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ammonite fossil
amulet, Crow 1850
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petrified palmwood
arrowhead, Texas
copyright Ray Stanford
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OTHER FOSSIL TALES
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