Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

behave in any sort of threatening way because physiology and body mechanics change with size. Zoologist Steven Thompson at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago argues that it would be unlikely for an abnormally giant boar to be very ferocious or fast because of scaling. “The structure of joints, limbs, leverage, and tensile strength would be entirely out of whack. While an acromegaliac animal may, in principle, seem fearsome, they would be more likely to be slow and awkward,” he says.
    All science aside, there is also a more practical problem with the concept of a giant boar having ever existed. Let’s face it, if a hunter at any point in the past three thousand years picked off a boar twice the size of any other boar ever seen, the bones of that giant animalwould have been preserved, put on display, and written about. 11 An argument could be made that boars are too rare today and that their populations are not big enough to have the genetic diversity necessary for the appearance of a giant member of their species to be statistically likely to arise from mutation. This is a fair point, but what about other animals, like foxes, goats, and coyotes? These animals all have huge populations, yet try finding any giant versions of them in museum exhibits. There aren’t any. With such huge populations, it would be expected that at least a few giants would turn up every now and again and be displayed or sold as oddities, but they do not. Either way, the possibility of a giant mutant boar or a small population of giant mutant boars having once existed looks doubtful. Instead, Thompson suggests that if the Calydonian boar is connected to the sightings of a real animal, it would be just a very large specimen of a normal animal. “I’m thinking we could be talking about an NFL defensive lineman of the boar population, an animal that naturally reaches the upper spectrum of large size and ferocity by eating well and learning, through various encounters, to behave aggressively,” he explains.
    Regardless of how they came to exist as monsters, both the Calydonian boar and Nemean lion lost their monster status over time. The lion appears almost exclusively as a skin worn by Hercules, with the mouth forming a sort of hood over his head in later art, while the boar is always vastly outnumbered by hunters with spears. This is a pretty substantial departure from early artwork. Moreover, Renaissance portrayals of these monsters are not particularly scary, which is surprising because they easily could have been.
    During the early and mid-1500s in Europe, artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Albrecht Dürer were demonstrating a tremendous understanding of how to control light and shadow in their paintings. By the time Peter Paul Rubens painted his version of the Calydonian boar hunt in 1611, he certainly knewhow to create a creepy or frightening scene if he wanted to. He had the artistic ability to put the boar in a dark forest full of shadows or have the monstrous animal charging out of a thicket hell-bent on destruction. Instead, his rendition of the hunt is brightly lit, colorful, and the boar is placed standing still in the foreground, as if waiting to be stabbed. If it were not for all the spears in everyone’s hands and the well-known mythology, viewers could have missed the fact that the painting was about a monster at all. 12 Yet it is hardly surprising that such a painting was made at this time.
    The Calydonian Boar Hunt, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on panel, 59.2 x 89.7 cm., c. 1611–1612. J. Paul Getty Museum.
    During the centuries after the days of the ancient Greeks, as the human population grew, forests became better explored and animals started being properly documented. Communities sprouted up in previously unpopulated areas, and towns grew larger. The natural world became less scary, and many predators quickly became the hunted as weapons improved. If a giant boar or lion species had ever actuallyexisted, it