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

had to have been driven to extinction. Certainly the normal-sized European lion, which may have inspired much of the fear that fueled the Nemean lion legend by simply living near Greek communities, went extinct around 100 AD. Fewer and fewer lions and boars of any size would have been around, and as they faded from the landscape, so too did monstrous stories associated with them. But even with the passing of the Calydonian boar and Nemean lion, monstrous animals did not cease to exist. A new threat emerged in the stories of Persia and Arabia around 1300 AD: the Rukh.
Feathery death
    Most famously described in the popular Persian folktales of Sinbad the sailor, as translated by Sir Richard Burton, the presence of the Rukh is first revealed by its egg. Sinbad, stranded on a newly discovered and seemingly uninhabited island, cannot work out what the giant white dome is when he first spots it. As he walks closer for a look, the summer day suddenly goes cool and the sky goes dark. Sinbad figures it has to be a cloud. “Methought a cloud had come over the sun, but it was the season of summer, so I marveled at this and, lifting my head, looked steadfastly at the sky, when I saw that the cloud was none other than an enormous bird, of gigantic girth and inordinately wide of wing, which as it flew through the air veiled the sun and hid it from the island.” The giant bird then comes in for a landing, settles on the dome, and begins brooding the egg.
    Sinbad, desperate to get off the island, unties his turban and uses it as a rope to hitch a ride on the Rukh when it flies off the next morning. It takes him to another island, where it first attacks and catches a large snake and then a rhinoceros. Later in his voyages, the Rukh attacks Sinbad and his fellow travelers after they have broken open its precious egg.
    Sightings of the Rukh are not limited to the tales of Sinbad. Marco Polo supposedly saw a bird so large that it could carry off an elephant in its talons and then drop it to its death from high above.
    There is no possibility of a bird having ever existed that could fly off with an elephant in its talons. This is not a mere matter of paleontology having failed to turn up the bones of such a beast. There is no need even to go searching for potential Rukh fossils, because the laws of physics get in the way. 13 For the Rukh to have been able to have carried what people say it carried, it would have needed to have had a wingspan greater than 50 meters (264 feet). To put that in perspective, such a wingspan is as long as the largest dinosaurs (which were themselves larger than many office buildings). It is five times larger than the wingspan of the largest known flying creature, a pterosaur from the age of the dinosaurs known as Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which seems to have already been pushing the boundaries of flight physiology and is widely thought to have behaved like a vulture that ate dead dinosaurs or hunted for prey while on the groundlike marabou storks rather than carry prey anywhere. The concept of such a large bird presents numerous physiological problems, like how it could have had a heart large enough to pump blood out to its wings and how its bones would not have broken under its own weight.
    So if such a monster could not have actually existed, where did the idea of a giant bird of prey come from? The largest birds alive today are the Andean condors. They are huge, with wingspans that sometimes extend as far as 10 feet (3 meters) in length. But they are docile scavengers that simply soar along the edges of canyons and over plains in search of carrion; picking up and dropping prey is not part of their repertoire. Moreover, they are found only in South America and cannot be associated with the Rukh legends, who created these tales, since the Persians and Arabians had not made it to the New World yet. There are some birds of prey that do feed on reasonably large mammals. The harpy eagle plucks monkeys out of trees, but