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

it too lives only in South America. However, the crowned eagle in sub-Saharan Africa is well documented for behaving in a similar fashion. It feeds primarily on medium-sized mammals. And if monkeys and small antelope are on the menu, one has to ask, why not small humans?
    Modern predatory birds are perfectly capable of causing people a lot of harm. There is one particularly frightening description in the New York Times in 1895 of two boys in California being fiercely attacked by an eagle as they approached its nest. Neither died, but one was disfigured and blinded. In a similar vein, in 2008, a boy in Michigan was hospitalized after an eagle attacked when he approached its nest. However, as much as eagles can hurt people foolish enough to get too close, they are not known to actively seek out humans for food. But this might not have always been the case.
    On the South Island of New Zealand, there once was a bird of prey larger than a harpy eagle. Known as Haast’s eagle, this bird probably weighed up to 33 pounds (15 kilograms) and had a wingspan of around 10 feet (3 meters). While hardly a giant, its diet iswidely thought to have consisted of the flightless birds known as moas, which were often the size of adult humans. Haast’s eagle lived on the island undisturbed until people arrived and started eating all the moas they could find. With no food to eat, the eagle went extinct. Exactly when this occurred is a mystery. Many records put its extinction date during the 1400s; others propose that it survived into the 1800s. Regardless, this was a bird capable of attacking and eating animals that were sometimes larger than humans, and it does not take much imagination to envision early islanders being killed by hungry Haast’s eagles. 14
    Another recently extinct bird that may have fueled the Rukh legend is the elephant bird of Madagascar, Aepyornis, which survived until 1030. It was huge, 10 feet (3 meters) tall, but hardly threatening. It was flightless, herbivorous, defenseless, and did not survive for long once humans started inhabiting the island shortly after 500. While they probably tasted like chicken and scared nobody at all, the discovery of such large birds may have led to stories that these were the not-yet-fledged juveniles of a much larger predatory bird.
    However, when it comes to the Rukh legend, Aepyornis and Haast’s eagle present problems of timing. Madagascar was not discovered by the Europeans and Arabs until the 1500s, and New Zealand was discovered by these groups only in the 1700s, but the Rukh starts being mentioned in stories hundreds of years earlier. It seems reasonable enough that the discovery of these birds may have increased belief in a monster that was already alive in the minds ofsailors, but it begs the question of where the idea for a giant bird that was flying off with elephants initially came from.
    Part of the legend of this monster undoubtedly came from people encountering fossilized dinosaur footprints. While dinosaurs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Diplodocus left footprints that could never be misinterpreted as having belonged to birds, the dinosaur group Theropoda that Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, and many other carnivores belonged to had members with feet that were distinctly birdlike. Did someone find these sorts of tracks and conclude that a giant bird once walked by? It seems plausible, but what about the idea of elephant-dropping behavior?
    In The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo wrote: “It is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure. The people of the isle call the bird Ruc.”
    What is astonishing is that this description precisely mirrors the behaviors of the bearded vulture, a bird dwelling in Africa and Asia today. It uses a tactic of grabbing the large bones of recently dead animals, flying