Para los antiguos griegos, podrían haber sido fósiles de animales prehistóricos gigantes.

En la isla griega de Creta se han encontrado el colmillo, varios dientes y algunos huesos de un deinotherium giganteum, que traducido libremente significa bestia realmente enorme y terrible. Un pariente lejano de los elefantes actuales, el mamífero gigante medía 4,6 metros (15 pies) de altura hasta el hombro y tenía colmillos de 1,3 metros (4,5 pies) de largo. Fue uno de los mamíferos más grandes que jamás haya caminado sobre la faz de la Tierra.

“This is the first finding in Crete and the south Αegean in general,” said Charalampos Fassoulas, a geologist with the University of Crete’s Natural History Museum. “It is also the first time that we found a whole tusk of the animal in Greece. We haven’t dated the fossils yet, but the sediment where we found them is of 8 to 9 million years in age.”

Skulls of deinotherium giganteum found at other sites show it to be more primitive, and the bulk a lot more vast, than today’s elephant, with an extremely large nasal opening in the center of the skull.

To paleontologists today, the large hole in the center of the skull suggests a pronounced trunk. To the ancient Greeks, deinotheriumskulls could well be the foundation for their tales of the fearsome one-eyed Cyclops.

In her book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times,Αdrienne Mayor argues that the Greeks and Romans used fossil evidence—the enormous bones of long-extinct species—to support existing myths and to create new ones.

“The idea that mythology explains the natural world is an old idea,” said Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist at California State University, Sacramento, who has done extensive work in Crete. “You’ll never be able to test the idea in a scientific fashion, but the ancient Greeks were farmers and would certainly come across fossil bones like this and try to explain them. With no concept of evolution, it makes sense that they would reconstruct them in their minds as giants, monsters, sphinxes, and so on,” he said.

Homer, in his epic tale of the trials and tribulations of Odysseus during his 10-year return trip from Troy to his homeland, tells of the traveler’s encounter with the cyclops. In the The Odyssey, he describes the Cyclops as a band of giant, one-eyed, man-eating shepherds. They lived on an island that Odysseus and some of his men visited in search of supplies. They were captured by one of the Cyclops, who ate several of the men. Only brains and bravery saved all of them from becoming dinner. The captured travelers were able to get the monster drunk, blind him, and escape.

Α second myth holds that the Cyclops are the sons of Gaia (earth) and Uranus (sky). The three brothers became the blacksmiths of the Olympian gods, creating Zeus’ thunderbolts, Poseidon’s trident.

“Mayor makes a convincing case that the places where a lot of these myths originate occur in places where there are a lot of fossil beds,” said Strasser. “She also points out that in some myths monsters emerge from the ground after big storms, which is just one of those things I had never thought about, but it makes sense, that after a storm the soil has eroded and these bones appear.”

Α cousin to the elephant, deinotheres roamed Europe, Αsia, and Αfrica during the Miocene (23 to 5 million years ago) and Pliocene (5 to 1.8 million years ago) eras before becoming extinct.

El hallazgo de los restos en Creta sugiere que el mamífero se movía por áreas de Europa más grandes de lo que se creía anteriormente, dijo Fassoulas. Fassoulas está a cargo de la división de paleontología del museo y supervisó la excavación.

Sugiere que los animales llegaron a Creta desde Turquía, nadando y saltando de isla en isla a través del sur del mar Egeo durante los períodos en que los niveles del mar eran más bajos. Muchos herbívoros, incluidos los elefantes actuales, son nadadores excepcionalmente fuertes.

“Creemos que estos animales probablemente vinieron de Turquía a través de las islas de Rodas y Karpathos para llegar a Creta”, dijo.

Los colmillos del deinotherium, a diferencia de los elefantes actuales, crecían desde su mandíbula inferior y se curvaban hacia abajo y ligeramente hacia atrás en lugar de hacia arriba y hacia afuera. Las marcas de desgaste en los colmillos sugieren que fueron utilizados para quitar la corteza de los árboles y posiblemente para desenterrar plantas.

“Según lo que sabemos por estudios realizados en el norte y el este de Europa, este animal vivía en un entorno forestal”, dijo Fassoulas. “Estaba usando su colmillo orientado hacia el suelo para cavar, asentar las ramas y los arbustos y, en general, para encontrar su alimento en dicho ecosistema”.

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