We rarely think about what animals look like underneath all that fur and skin. For example, did you know that an elephant’s skull has a huge hole right in the middle?
It’s easy for us, as people who know what an elephant looks like, to realize that the hole marks the location of the elephant’s trunk. However, the ancient Greeks didn’t have the luxury of that knowledge, so when they found the giant skulls of an elephant’s prehistoric relative, Deinotherium giganteum, they made the only assumption they could: It belonged to a giant one-eyed man.
Author Adrienne Mayor suggests that the bones and skull of this early elephant paved the way for the myth of the Cyclops, along with tales of other mythical animals. It may seem silly now, but an ancient Greek probably wouldn’t have thought it any less plausible than a giant four-legged beast with a nose the length of its body. In fact, when more artists from the Middle Ages were tasked with drawing an elephant from such a vague description, they came up with creatures as implausible as the cyclops.
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