Field Museum exhibit shows that mythical creatures didn't just spring from imagination.

One of the world's great research depositories of animal bones, hides, feathers and DNA samples, the Field Museum this week openstemporary exhibit on fantastic creatures that can be found in no natural history collection. (Mar. 18, 2008)


The Field Museum opens this week exhibiting a collection of fantastic creatures that can not be found in any natural history museum.

The exhibit, entitled “Mythic Creature: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids” tries to provide a logical explanation on how these mythical creatures came to existence.

“We are trying to show the breadth and depth of human imagination,” said chief curator and anthropologist Laurel Kendall. This exhibit is in conjunction with 3 other museums.

The exhibit includes a huge skull that was found in an island cave during the Ancient Greek times. The skull’s distinct single eyeball hole in the forehead leads paleontologists and anthropologists to consider it as evidence that one-eyed giants known as Cyclops, once existed.

“If you look in Greek literature to find the places the ancients said giants lived, you can do an overlay of a map of the Mediterranean region where modern paleontologists find dinosaur and woolly mammoth fossils,” said Mark Norell, an American Museum paleontologist.

However, though this one-eyed skull may be likely a Cyclops, modern zoologist described the bones as merely pygmy elephants that went extinct 100,000 to 300,000 years ago.

“The ancients had simply turned the skull upside down, and the single hole they thought was for Cyclops’ eye is actually the skull opening where the elephant’s trunk was attached.”


Another myth character featured in the exhibit is a desiccated carcass of a half-woman, half fish creature. Mermaids, as these creatures are widely known have permeated literary traditions and cultures all over the world. Even Christopher Columbus reported Mermaid sightings on his 1493 account where he stated he spotted three mermaids off the coast of Haiti. Columbus reported these creatures are not as pretty as the artists depicted.

The mermaid carcass in the exhibit is possibly the infamous “Feejee Mermaid” that P.T. Barnum showcased during the 19th Century in New York. The carcass is one of the examples of how artisans hundreds of years ago have used dried-out monkey heads and arms and fish tails to create the artful papier-mache masterpiece.

The exhibit shows a mix of artifacts from mermaid-mache to sculptures of imaginary creatures like Kraken, sea monsters as how they were depicted on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” Films and life-size unicorns. The museum also exhibited large bird creatures, griffins and European and Asian versions of dragons.