The Kraken ate ships.

The octopus-like sea monster attacked a ship from below.  Stretching its mighty tentacles up, it would reach the same height as the main mast and hug its arms around the ship.

Sailors would tumble overboard and drown in the waves or be eaten.

The Kraken was rumored to be a mile in diameter and its arms were sometimes mistaken for small islands.

The humongous sea beast isn’t real. It never was. But it lives in the Field’s Mythical Creatures exhibit (on display until Sept 1, 2008).

In its corner, the Kraken’s fist-sized, red eyes stare listlessly. A tip-of-the-iceberg sized piece of its red head lurks on the floor, and its tentacles jut out, curved and hooked ready to bear-hug any ship or whale in its reach.  

The myth of the giant creature of the deep was spawned probably in the 15^th or 16^th century by Norwegian people to explain why sailors never came back from sea trips, said Tom Skwerski, project manager at the Field Museum.

The myth didn’t come from a dream or hallucination; the Kraken was probably based on sightings of a giant or colossal squid.

 “Sailors had interaction with these squids,” he said. “They would find a tentacle floating on the surface of the water or in the belly of a whale, or one would wash up on shore.”

The giant squid is real, and still lives. It has a long and lean head and can measure between 33 and 44 feet long, about as long as a school bus, with an eye 10 inches in diameter, the size of a beach ball. A colossal squid’s head is rounder, like a two-headed mushroom, and measures up to 45 feet in length. The cousins live in the deep of the ocean, around 3,000 feet -- about 10 football fields straight down under the surface.

Those giant and colossal squids do surface occasionally, sometimes accidently. Two unsuspecting fishermen caught a 33-foot colossal squid off the coast of New Zealand in 2007.

Sailors from the age of exploration saw those squids too, and didn’t know what they were. Thus the Kraken was born.

“Scientific research [and] technology advances enable us to study underwater life and discover giant squids and explain the Kraken probably was a giant squid,” said Chapurukha Kusimba, a curator of anthropology who worked on the creatures of the water part of the exhibit.

As for proof, next to the Kraken’s fiery head and imposing limbs is a 6-foot long tentacle cut from a giant squid, curled up and preserved in a jar.

 The Kraken isn’t the only mythical creature that arose because of misunderstood bones or animals. Giants, Cyclopes, griffins, unicorns and dragons are mythical creatures science has solved.

Finding Fossils and Links

The way the ancient Greeks confirmed stories about giants and Cyclopes is actually quite logical.

Ancient Greeks told legends about huge creatures, like giants and Cyclopes, who walked the Earth before people did. After disputes with the Gods, there were raging battles.

The Gods won. Zeus annihilated the creatures with his lightning.

The bones of Giants are most likely mammoth bones, said Adrienne Mayor, a visiting scholar in classics and history of science of classics at Stanford University. In a video at the Field Museum, she re-arranged a plastic skeleton of a mammoth, a giant extinct elephant-like animal, and turned it into a skeleton of a person.

The ancient Greeks found these bones in peat, which is a type of crude oil. When it ignites, it just burns and burns and burns, possibly for hundreds of years.

Greeks knew lightning could cause a fire, and that Zeus had killed the Giants and the Cyclopes with lightning. They came to the most logical conclusion: These are the bones of a Giant or Cyclops and this was the ancient battleground where they were struck down by Zeus.  

The ancient Greeks believed giants and Cyclopes were extinct creatures because the stories had that little bit of science in it.

“It’s logical given their beliefs and observations,” Mayor said. “They found [the mammoth bones] in an area that’s still burning…It’s logical once you wrap your head around it.”

Mayor talks about Greek myths and fossils in her book, “The First Fossil Hunters.”

The griffin, a half-eagle, half-lion regal creature, is a mythical beast close to Mayor’s heart; it took her 15 years to figure out that the myth of the griffin was based on unearthed protoceratops bones.

The protoceratops was a four-legged, beaked dinosaur with a bony, crowned skull. That bony tiara was very thin and eroded away, leaving what looked like a wing.

“When I realized [the griffin] had a beak and four legs, and many dinosaurs had a beak and four legs, I had to trace [the griffin] story back to its origins,” Mayor said.

Once she did that, she made two maps, one of where protoceratops bones were found, and one where the stories of the griffins surfaced. And then she laid one on top of the other.

Not to her surprise, they lined up.

“Based on an artifact, scientists can look back at the myth and explain how the myth arose,” Kusimba said.

The bigger mystery is not what these legends are, but how they came about.

“Bones either spurred a myth to explain the finding, or people already had a myth and the bones solidified the myth,” Skwerski said.

It is doubtful scientist will ever figure out whether the fossils or the stories came first.

“There’s no way of knowing what inspired them,” Mayor said. 

Myths into Science

Mayor was one of the first to make the process of dispelling myths a scientific endeavor.  

“[Scientists] started dispelling myths when they had fossil records to compare them to,” Skwerski said. “If you have a mammoth skeleton, you can take this bone and compare it and say this isn’t a giant, it’s a mammoth bone.”

Even though Paleontological evidence starting mounting in the 1800s, finding the truth about mythical creatures has long been a footnote in the scientific community – literally.

“No one takes these stories seriously because they welled up from ordinary people,” Mayor said, explaining scientists have a lot of respect for big names from ancient literature like Aristotle or Plato, and those early scholars also ignored the tales.

“In philosophy, they never talked about ordinary people finding large bones,” she said. “Elite writers in antiquity and classical philosophers ignored it and dismissed it as fiction, fantasy or religious superstition.”

Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel suggested in 1914 the myth of the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant, might have been inspired by shipwrecked Greek sailors who found fossil skulls of mammoths, a common find in Aegean coastal caves.

The skulls have a large central opening for the trunk, but ancient Greeks were unfamiliar with elephants. It was only logical to assume the hole was a single large eye socket.

Abel’s suggestion encouraged Mayor to search for other mythical creatures that might have been influenced by ancient findings of fossils of long extinct creatures.

Scientists are now starting to get excited about finding the scientific explanations behind myths, Mayor said.

“It also educates people to see scientific impulse is an ancient impulse, and it gives more respect for ancestors’ thought processes. [These stories] weren’t a ridiculous explanation.”

For example, scientists found that dragon bones were dinosaur or wooly rhinoceros bones. The unicorn’s horn was most likely the tooth of a narwhal, a rarely seen whale that lives in Northern arctic waters and has a 9-foot ivory tusk protruding out of its upper lip.  

But dispelling myths is more challenging than it sounds because it’s easier to prove something is real than imaginary.  

“It’s harder to prove something doesn’t exist,” Skwerski said, adding he got a letter from a man dismayed that Bigfoot was mentioned in the Mythical Creatures exhibit because there is no proof he’s not real.

Bigfoot, or the legend of some sort of hairy, ape-like humanoid that leaves traces of itself (but no official sighting or fossil) through giant footprints and tufts of hair in North America, has eluded scientific explanation because they simply can’t prove it doesn’t exist.   

Scientists have tried to prove it’s not real by using DNA sequencing. They take bits of purported Bigfoot hair and run them through a data base, comparing them to other sample hairs.

With DNA sequencing, you take evidence and in the case of Bigfoot, can prove 99 percent of that hair matches something else with 100 percent certainty.

But that but that other 1 percent can't be proved, so you can’t say it’s a creature you can identify, Skwerski said.

Natural History of Human Imagination

The Dragon is a famous myth both in ancient Asia and Medieval Europe, but the creature looked different and had different roles in each culture.

The Eastern Dragon is often depicted with bright colors and is worshiped, while the Western dragon was often lizard-like and wreaked havoc on a community until a brave knight defeated it.

“Culture is directly related to mythical creatures,” Skwerski said. “Their world view explained why things happen.”

Though Eastern and Western cultures are starkly different, what amazes Kusimba is that the same creatures arose in parts of the world that had no interaction with each other.

“The truly fascinating thing about the exhibit is that it casts doubt on the views that divided people,” he said. “[It shows] that we are the same species, very similar development with the human mind. The human mind is so irregular [yet] we imagined things in very similar ways.” 

It’s a test of the natural history of the human imagination.