Here is a smalll (2.29g)
ketos coin I purchased from Brian Kritt who was the first to identify Kindya as the likely
mint of the issue.
The
style of the ketos' neck is very unusual. It looks more like a backbone than a lizard's frill. I believe that this depicting was likely inspired by large animal fossils.
In
mythology,
Perseus killed the
ketos at Joppa. Also at Joppa there was a giant skeleton. Coincidence? The skeleton of a sea monster was moved to
Rome in 58 BC by
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. Pliny claimed the monster’s backbone was 40 feet long and 1.5 feet thick with
ribs taller than an Indian
elephant.
What did Scaurus bring to
Rome from Joppa? Adrienne Mayor, in her book The First Fossil Hunters, argues Scaurus’ skeleton was the fossil of a giant
elephant, the prehistoric mastodon. Pliny doesn’t mention Andromeda or
Perseus in connection with Scaurus’s monster. It is tempting to link them. Adrienne Mayor believes the ancient
Greeks, seeing fossils, imagined petrified giants and
animals. Legends of griffins may have a similar origin. Mayor mentions that the playwright Aeschylus, born circa 525 BC, “was fascinated by the
geography and customs of strange lands. He was the earliest writer to use the information about Scythia’s landscape and folklore … [he] describes the lonely caravan trails leading to a desolate country where nomads prospect for gold, a desert inhabited by monstrous Gorgons who magically turn living things to
stone, and by fearsome griffins. The griffins Aeschylus likens to ‘silent hounds with cruel, shap beaks.’”3
Mayer believes that Greek artistic depictions of griffins are ancient attempts to reconstruct the appearance of dinosaurs they knew from fossil skeletons. She says “Despite the poetic license granted by tragedy and myth, Aeschylus was a careful zoologist—he takes pains to distinguish the wingless eagle-beaked griffins from actual winged eagles.”
