The Gold, the Nest, and a Modern Fossil Hypothesis

Two later developments should be kept apart from the ancient record. The first is medieval and Christian: writers read the griffin allegorically, its lion and eagle natures made a figure of Christ's dual kingship, while heraldry adopted it as a charge signifying vigilance and valour. The second is modern and contested.

The folklorist and historian of science Adrienne Mayor, in The First Fossil Hunters (2000), proposed that the Greek griffin image was shaped by nomads encountering the fossil beds of Central Asia, where the beaked, four-legged skeletons of Protoceratops and its relatives lie near gold-bearing ground, a "geomythology" that would explain the beak, the four legs and the gold in one stroke. It is an elegant hypothesis and it remains a hypothesis: the griffin image is attested in the Near East long before, and independently of, any Scythian fossil field, and the ancient pedigree and the fossil conjecture are not the same claim.