Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

[BigJackBrass]

Thanks to David Crowell for sharing this link on the Terra Incognita mailing list.

 

Does this really show An Ancient Stegosaur Depiction At Angkor Wat?

 

Your pulp adventurers might be very surprised at what they bump into in the jungles of Cambodia!

[BoneDaddy]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

OK, I give up. What the hell is that?

[keithcurtis]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

It's George.

 

Keith "Obscure reference" Curtis

[Susano]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

It's George.

 

Keith "Obscure reference" Curtis

 

Oh, good, I've been looking all over for him!

[Susano]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

On a more serious note -- that might be some sort of crocodile.

[L. Marcus]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

A rhino? Or a buffalo?

[Susano]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

I saw wondering if it might be a form of makara (see the ABs). A chimera.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

COULD be. Maybe. Could also be a crude representation of something completely different with previously separate elements of the background incorporated.

 

Theory of mine. Consider the interesting universality of the "Dragon" myth - lots of cultures all over the world have legends/traditions relating to dragons, great serpents and so forth.

 

Dinosaurs as a scientifically-identified group have existed for only a couple of centuries at best. I suggest that dino fossils have been repeatedly found by humans throughout history (and pre-history), and this forms a major basis for numerous "Dragon" legends. I know that traditional Chinese medicine has, for centuries, included ground-up fossils as an ingredient - usually known as "Dragon Bones".

 

With this in mind, it is not so hard to believe that a particularly bright individual in ancient times could have found a relatively intact fossil skeleton, and make a fair stab at reconstructing what the beast looked like.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

COULD be. Maybe. Could also be a crude representation of something completely different with previously separate elements of the background incorporated.

 

Theory of mine. Consider the interesting universality of the "Dragon" myth - lots of cultures all over the world have legends/traditions relating to dragons, great serpents and so forth.

 

Dinosaurs as a scientifically-identified group have existed for only a couple of centuries at best. I suggest that dino fossils have been repeatedly found by humans throughout history (and pre-history), and this forms a major basis for numerous "Dragon" legends. I know that traditional Chinese medicine has, for centuries, included ground-up fossils as an ingredient - usually known as "Dragon Bones".

 

With this in mind, it is not so hard to believe that a particularly bright individual in ancient times could have found a relatively intact fossil skeleton, and make a fair stab at reconstructing what the beast looked like.

 

You pretty well summed up my thoughts on the matter.

[assault]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

A rhino? Or a buffalo?

 

My guess was a water buffalo, with "something else" providing the apparent back scales.

 

But in a Pulp Game, it obviously is indeed a Stegosaurus.

[Markdoc]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

My guess was a water buffalo' date=' with "something else" providing the apparent back scales.[/quote']

 

A lotus flower by the look of it

 

But in a Pulp Game' date=' it obviously is indeed a Stegosaurus.[/quote']

 

Of course!

 

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

My guess was a water buffalo, with "something else" providing the apparent back scales.

 

But in a Pulp Game, it obviously is indeed a Stegosaurus.

 

But of course.

 

For another pulp-resource, check out the Dragon of the Ishtar Gate

 

 

Another dinosaur anyone?

[BigJackBrass]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

Of course one of the problems with things like this is the "Blue Monkey" effect: Tell someone to clear their mind and not think of a blue monkey and of course that's all they can think of, so once someone suggests it's a stegosaurus then that's what keeps leaping out at you. Well perhaps not, since it was an herbivore, but you see what I mean...

 

But this is pulp! It's a stegosaurus and it's probably being chased by something hungry

[yamamura]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

I was thinking a boar with his hackles raised.

[Vestnik]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

Dinosaurs as a scientifically-identified group have existed for only a couple of centuries at best. I suggest that dino fossils have been repeatedly found by humans throughout history (and pre-history), and this forms a major basis for numerous "Dragon" legends. I know that traditional Chinese medicine has, for centuries, included ground-up fossils as an ingredient - usually known as "Dragon Bones".

 

In the City of God, St. Augustine uses the existence of giant bones in the earth as evidence that the Biblical Giants were real.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

In the City of God' date=' St. Augustine uses the existence of giant bones in the earth as evidence that the Biblical Giants were real.[/quote']

 

Indeed. There is also a theory bandied about recently that the "giant cyclops" legend of ancient Greece MAY have been inspired by the fossil skulls of an extinct species of pygmy elephant once extant on Cyprus.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

Indeed. There is also a theory bandied about recently that the "giant cyclops" legend of ancient Greece MAY have been inspired by the fossil skulls of an extinct species of pygmy elephant once extant on Cyprus.

 

Makes sense to me. Elephant skulls look VERY cyclopean

[FenrisUlf]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

Thanks to David Crowell for sharing this link on the Terra Incognita mailing list.

 

Does this really show An Ancient Stegosaur Depiction At Angkor Wat?

 

Your pulp adventurers might be very surprised at what they bump into in the jungles of Cambodia!

 

Probably not a stegosaur in the boring real world*, but in Pulp, why not?

 

* -- But I would like to know just what exactly it actually is a depiction of.

[FenrisUlf]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

But of course.

 

For another pulp-resource, check out the Dragon of the Ishtar Gate

 

 

Another dinosaur anyone?

 

Anyone remember the very pulpish novel that L. Sprague DeCamp wrote around the idea of Imperial Persian explorers looking for the sirrush in Central Africa? It was his greatest novel IMO.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

Makes sense to me. Elephant skulls look VERY cyclopean

 

decided to go look for appropriate looking skulls, on a whim

Ta Da!

A mammoth skull (which happens to look a WHOLE lot like it came from a cyclops)

[Susano]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

decided to go look for appropriate looking skulls, on a whim

Ta Da!

A mammoth skull (which happens to look a WHOLE lot like it came from a cyclops)

 

I've heard that theory before and it sounds credible. I've also heard that dinosaur bones were thought proof of pre-flood giants.

[Vestnik]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

I've heard that theory before and it sounds credible. I've also heard that dinosaur bones were thought proof of pre-flood giants.

 

St. Augustine City of God, 15:9:

 

Chapter 9.—Of the Long Life and Greater Stature of the Antediluvians.

 

Wherefore no one who considerately weighs facts will doubt that Cain might have built a city, and that a large one, when it is observed how prolonged were the lives of men, unless perhaps some sceptic take exception to this very length of years which our authors ascribe to the antediluvians and deny that this is credible. And so, too, they do not believe that the size of men's bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the same, when he speaks of that huge stone which had been fixed as a landmark, and which a strong man of those ancient times snatched up as he fought, and ran, and hurled, and cast it,—

"Scarce twelve strong men of later mould

That weight could on their necks uphold."

thus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men. And if in the more recent times, how much more in the ages before the world-renowned deluge? But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchres, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man's molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature. And neither in our own age nor any other have there been altogether wanting instances of gigantic stature, though they may be few. The younger Pliny, a most learned man, maintains that the older the world becomes, the smaller will be the bodies of men. And he mentions that Homer in his poems often lamented the same decline; and this he does not laugh at as a poetical figment, but in his character of a recorder of natural wonders accepts it as historically true. But, as I said, the bones which are from time to time discovered prove the size of the bodies of the ancients, and will do so to future ages, for they are slow to decay. But the length of an antediluvian's life cannot now be proved by any such monumental evidence. But we are not on this account to withhold our faith from the sacred history, whose statements of past fact we are the more inexcusable in discrediting, as we see the accuracy of its prediction of what was future. And even that same Pliny tells us that there is still a nation in which men live 200 years. If, then, in places unknown to us, men are believed to have a length of days which is quite beyond our own experience, why should we not believe the same of times distant from our own? Or are we to believe that in other places there is what is not here, while we do not believe that in other times there has been anything but what is now?

 

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120115.htm

[SCUBA Hero]

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

 

decided to go look for appropriate looking skulls, on a whim

Ta Da!

A mammoth skull (which happens to look a WHOLE lot like it came from a cyclops)

That's a Cylon skull, not a mammoth skull...