Search

The Unicorn, the Mermaid, and the Centaur
by Robin Meadows
Listen now

People have been perpetrating—and falling for—mythological hoaxes for centuries. Among the most amazing are a unicorn skeleton assembled by a German scientist in the 1600s, a preserved mermaid exhibited by P.T. Barnum in the 1800s, and a Greek centaur excavation faked by an American biologist in the 1990s.

Why did they do it? "There are many reasons for hoaxes, from playfulness to maliciousness to greed for money or attention," says Neil Greenberg, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

And why should we care? The motives behind these hoaxes, as well as our reactions to them today, show how far we have come in deciphering fossils and other biological remains, which is key to understanding the history of life on Earth.

Greenberg knows about the reasons for hoaxes firsthand because he is one of the perpetrators of the centaur hoax. But while he does so knowingly, with the intent to teach, the unicorn hoax probably started as an honest mistake.

Leibniz's Unicorn
The supposed unicorn skeleton was given credence in the mid-1700s by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, one of the greatest naturalists and philosophers of his time. Paleontology was in its infancy, and Leibniz documented all the fossils he knew of in his book Protogaea, or A Dissertation on the Original Aspect of the Earth and the Vestiges of Its Very Ancient History in the Monuments of Nature, published in 1749. At the end of the book, after pages of drawings of real fossils from shells to fish imprints, he included a sketch of a unicorn skeleton. The accompanying text cites a 1663 paper by noted scientist Otto von Guericke, who wrote that the "skeleton of a unicorn" had been dug up in a quarry in Germany's Harz Mountains near the town of Quedlinburg. Leibniz then goes on to say that,

As is usual with such brutes, its posterior parts were very low and its head raised. Its forehead bore a horn nearly five ells long, as thick as a man's thigh but gradually tapering. Because of the ignorance and carelessness of the diggers, the skeleton was broken and extracted in pieces. However, the horn, which was attached to the head, several ribs, and the backbone were brought to the abbess of the town.

The fact that the horn was attached to a fragment of bone was one of the strongest points in favor of the interpretation that this was indeed a unicorn skeleton.

To modern eyes, Leibniz's unicorn looks preposterous. There are obvious problems with the skeleton as assembled, beginning with the glaring lack of hind legs and the resulting extreme slope of the backbone, which juts at a 45 degree angle from the skull so that the tailbone rests directly on the ground. More subtly, the bones are put together wrong, with the spinal column backward so that the skull and neck vertebrae are attached to the tail end. Finally, the bones come from more than one kind of animal. The skeleton in the drawing has since been identified as a mix of rhinoceros and mammoth bones. The unicorn's horn is likely to be a young mammoth's tusk: These long teeth are straight and grow out of the jawbone, thus explaining the bone fragment at the base of the "unicorn horn."

It's easy to laugh. After all, how could Leibniz and his contemporaries actually believe in unicorns? Because they were going on the best evidence available to them at the time. The assembled skeleton came on the heels of eyewitness accounts from Portuguese travelers, who claimed to have seen a living unicorn in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). And, people had accepted unicorns as real creatures for more than 2,000 years. The Greeks included unicorns in their natural histories as early as the fifth century B.C.E., presenting them as fact rather than myth, and European scholars continued to assert the existence of unicorns well into the 1700s.

Moreover, naturalists were still trying to make sense of fossils during Leibniz's time. Back then, most people didn't even realize that fossils were the remains of living things. The word "fossil" comes from the Latin for "dug up," and originally encompassed all kinds of objects found underground, from crystals to gemstones, in addition to what we recognize as fossils today. As for where fossils in the modern sense originated, the prevailing theory was that animal "seeds" washed into the ground through fissures, and then grew deep in the earth out of minerals from the surrounding rocks.

This idea was given credence by the many fossils of improbable-looking creatures. At that time, no one had ever seen these creatures, either because they were extinct (such as ammonites, giant nautilus relatives with shells up to six feet in diameter) or because they had not yet been discovered (such as crinoids or sea lilies, which are related to sea stars but resemble plants and can grow to be three feet across). "In many ways, it was less outlandish to believe that stones would sometimes mimic the forms of the animal world than to believe that animals could turn to stone," says J. Bret Bennington, a paleontologist at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, in his online publication, "A Short History of Paleontology."

The idea that fossils come from real animals can be traced back to ancient Greeks in the sixth century B.C.E., when Pythagoras and Herodotus deduced that stone shells and fish imprints were remnants of living creatures. Likewise, Leonardo da Vinci and other luminaries through the ages had figured it out, and were proven right soon after Leibniz described the unicorn. By the early 1700s, people had discovered fossils of so many forms of life, as well as living creatures corresponding to so many of the improbable-looking fossils, that the organic origin of fossils was finally widely accepted.

The Feejee Mermaid
While Leibniz's unicorn was an honest mistake, the Feejee Mermaid was an outright lie. Phineas Taylor Barnum knew full well that the mermaid was a fake when he presented it as the real thing in his American Museum in New York City in the 1840s, and he went to great lengths to hoodwink the public.

It helped that the mermaid was so skillfully constructed that it had already fooled many people, beginning with the Boston sea captain who brought it to London in the early 1820s. The story goes that Captain Samuel Barrett Eades bought the mermaid from Dutch merchants, who in turn had bought it from a Japanese fisherman who claimed to have caught it in his nets. Eades evidently believed that he had lucked into a great treasure, because he sold his ship and cargo to pay for the mermaid. While the three-foot-long dried specimen did have the basic mermaid components of a woman-like top and a fishy tail with no obvious discontinuity between the two halves, it was hardly the beautiful creature of folklore. The mermaid was downright homely, with a grotesque face and an assortment of spines and spiky fins. Even so, when Eades brought the mermaid to London, a number of British naturalists verified its authenticity in scholarly articles.

In 1842, Eades' son sold the mermaid to an American showman who then leased it to P.T. Barnum. With the help of an accomplice, Barnum set to work constructing an elaborate hoax around the mermaid. First, he created a buzz by planting anonymous letters in newspapers saying that the famous British naturalist Dr. Griffin was coming to the United States with a mermaid caught off the Feejee Islands. Barnum's accomplice then posed as Dr. Griffin and grudgingly showed the mermaid to the press in Philadelphia, who obligingly wrote stories vouching for its authenticity. Next, Dr. Griffin repeated the scam in New York City, getting even more free publicity and further piquing the public's interest. Only then did Barnum enter the fray, saying that he wanted to display the mermaid but that Dr. Griffin refused to let him. By the time Barnum finally exhibited the Feejee Mermaid, people were so excited that they thronged to see it. And Barnum made thousands of dollars per week, a small fortune at the time. As he is reputed to have said, "A sucker is born every minute."

Today, the Feejee Mermaid is listed among the holdings of Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where it was long believed by museum curators to have been made by sewing the head and torso of a monkey to the tail of a fish. In 1990, a curator at the museum ran some tests on it and discovered that the top half was really made of papier-mâché, the tail was a decapitated salmon, and the sharp teeth, spiny "fingernails," and various fins were from a carp.

Like Leibniz's unicorn, the Feejee Mermaid is easy to laugh at today. How could so many people have fallen for it? For one thing, like unicorns, mermaids had been reported since the time of the ancient Greeks. Furthermore, mermaids were still being reported by eminently respectable men, including explorer Henry Hudson, who said he saw a mermaid while searching for the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as late as the 1600s. And mermaid sightings had been reported off the coast of Scotland as recently as the early 1800s, just decades before Barnum displayed the Feejee Mermaid. Another reason so many people were fooled was that Barnum cleverly exhibited the mermaid alongside other creatures that look like fantastical hybrids but really do exist, including a swordfish and a duck-billed platypus. Newspaper advertisements blurred the line between fact and fiction, describing the platypus as "half-bird, half-beast" and the mermaid as "half-fish, half-human."

The Centaur of Volos
While the Feejee Mermaid hoax was intended to deceive, the Centaur of Volos hoax is intended to teach. Volos is a real city in Greece, but all the rest is pure fantasy. The centaur skeleton was assembled in the 1980s by William Willers, then a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Willers combined bones from a Shetland pony and a human skeleton that had previously been used in an anatomy class, and stained them with tea to make them look old.

In 1994, biology professor Neil Greenberg and art professor Beauvais Lyons brought the centaur skeleton to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The centaur was a perfect fit with their extracurricular interests. Greenberg periodically offers a class called "Biological Mythology" and once sponsored a forum called "Zoological Hoaxes as Catalysts for Critical Inquiry." Lyons is Director of the Hokes Archives (Get it? Say it out loud!), purportedly the collected works of British archaeologist Everitt Ormsby Hokes, who was conveniently omitted from historical accounts but supposedly discovered several obscure cultures that have been neglected by contemporary archaeologists.

Greenberg and Lyons' centaur display looks like it belongs in a natural history museum. A glass-topped case contains the centaur skeleton, which is partially embedded in a sandstone slab and surrounded by inscribed clay tablets. The accompanying text says the skeleton dates to about 1300 B.C.E. and that it is "one of three centaur burials discovered in 1980 by the Archaeological Society of Argos Orestiko, eight kilometers northeast of Volos, Greece." Rounding out the display are a map of Greece, a print of centaur anatomy, and ancient-looking pottery. When Lyons asked a student looking at the display, "Do you believe in centaurs?" the answer was, "I'm not sure but it sure looks authentic." Which is precisely the point of the hoax. "I want my students skeptical. Science is not a pile of facts and bones," says Greenberg, adding that science is "acts of critical inquiry, driven by imagination and reined in by logic."


Why Getting Paleontology Right Is Important
Even in modern times, the boundary between the possible and the impossible is not always clear-cut. The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has been hotly contested since first being proposed in the late 1800s, although it is generally accepted that the weight of evidence supports it today. And the jury is still out on exactly where whales came from. Once thought to have evolved from hooved carnivores called mesonychids that lived between 60 and 30 millions years ago, recent fossil and molecular evidence shows that whales actually descended from herbivores. Now the question is whether whales evolved from hippo-like animals. While the molecular evidence says yes, so far, at least, the fossil evidence does not.

Such controversies are hot among paleontologists, but seem to have little impact on our lives one way or the other. But interpreting the fossil record is of more than academic importance. Take global climate change. The consensus is that people are making the Earth's atmosphere warmer by producing increasing amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, but nobody is really sure what to expect. How much and how fast will the climate change? And what will the impact be?

The answers may lie in the past. The Earth has previously had natural periods of warming, and the fossil record shows how plants and animals were affected by the increased temperatures. "The history of life on this planet has a lot to tell us about our possible future," says Scott Wing, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Wing led a team that studied fossils of plants that grew about 55 million years ago, when global temperatures rose rapidly. Air temperatures shot up as much as 18ºF in the Arctic and Antarctic, and water temperatures rose as much as 11ºF in tropical oceans. A likely cause was a massive release of the greenhouse gas methane from deep-sea sediments, which contain frozen methane deposits that may be released during underwater landslides triggered by earthquakes.

The fossil record shows that during this ancient warming period, plants much like poinsettias and sumac migrated about 1,000 miles north from the Gulf Coast to the Wyoming area. "Palm trees grew in Montana," says Wing. Other researchers found that animals likewise migrated north as the climate warmed. However, things are very different today. People have fragmented habitats so much that it's unlikely many plants and animals could follow their preferred climates, which means that future global warming could result in extinctions rather than migrations.

We have come a long way since people believed that fossils grew underground, but there are surely plenty of surprises ahead. Science is a process of constant reevaluation and revision in light of new discoveries, and this may be particularly true when it comes to interpreting fossils. "Paleontology is art, science, and imagination," says Richard Stucky of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The same can be said of Leibniz's unicorn, the Feejee Mermaid, and the Centaur of Volos, albeit with an emphasis on art and imagination over science; perhaps that's why these mythological hoaxes have been so effective. And why new ones keep popping up. An April 1, 2006, article in The Economist featured a biologist who wanted to turn horses into unicorns and lizards into dragons. His plan? To use computers to predict the accelerated evolution of the real creatures into the mythical ones. Next, he'd simulate and synthesize the mythical animals' DNA, then inject it into the corresponding real creatures' eggs. His name? Paolo Fril, an anagram of April Fool. Like those before it, this mythological hoax sounds almost good enough to be true.

—Robin Meadows is a contributing editor of ZooGoer. She wrote about whale worms in the March/April 2005 issue.

ZooGoer 35(6) 2006. Copyright 2006 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.

If you have a comment about Smithsonian Zoogoer magazine, please email it to us.

Page Controls