Fantastical Creatures

In all of the cultures around the world, current and historical, there are many mythical creatures in religion and folklore: dragons, giants, unicorns or other flying horses, ogres and trolls (the non-Disqus types), giant snakes, giant wolves, or strange hybrids of two or more animals.

Sometimes, you can see how people in prehistory may have interpreted things that they came across in the world as it was then. Early quarry workers and miners discovering dinosaur fossils might have imagined they had found dragon bones!

And talking of fantastical creatures, in prehistory, some pretty impressive creatures existed.

Nuralagus - a rabbit that lived on the island of Minorca and was about four feet long (1.25 m) and weighed at least 25 pounds (11.5 kg). That would certainly put a dent in your carrot patch!

Glyptodon - a giant armadillo, which was the size and shape of a VW Beetle. Early South Americans hunted it to extinction for its meat. They also used its shell as a shelter.

Deinogalerix, the biggest known hedgehog, was two feet long (0.61 m) and weighed about 10 pounds (4.5 kg)

Gigantopithecus blacki, the largest ape of all time, was about twice the size of a modern gorilla.

Megalodon was one shark you would definitely need a bigger boat for!

Coelacanth - an ancient deep-sea dwelling fish believed to be extinct until one was discovered in a fisherman’s catch in 1938.

As a kid, I used to scour our local quarry for fossils and had quite a collection. Nothing as impressive as the creatures shown above, but some lovely prehistoric plants, as where we lived, those rock layers had once been part of an ancient sea. It was always fun trying to work out what I had found.
Unfortunately, my collection got lost in one or another house move.

So, do you have any mythical creatures in the folklore of your part of the world?
Have you ever been fossil hunting, and did you find anything interesting?

Let’s share all kinds of fantastical creatures, real or mythical, today.