Reddit mentions of The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

It's actually a ceratopsid reimagined with a human head. When ceratopsid fossils were found in ancient times, with their beaks and four legs and long tails they were imagined as a cross between a lion and an eagle with the frill being the remnants of wings. Mammoth skulls with their central opening were thought to be Cyclops. Huge bones the remains of giants. Iguanodon might have been the first fossil recognized for what it was but hardly the first dinosaur fossil ever found.

Cyclops Myth Spurred by 'One-Eyed' Fossils?

The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

>From Scientific American The history of paleontology, as it is usually seen, starts with the work of French naturalist Georges Cuvier some 200 years ago. Mayor, a classical folklorist, moves the date back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. "The ancients collected, measured, displayed, and pondered the bones of extinct beasts," she writes, "and they recorded their discoveries and imaginative interpretations of the fossil remains in numerous writings that survive today." Among the beasts whose bones they pondered were giant giraffes, mammoths and mastodons. Mayor also proposes that the griffin of classical folklore, described in the legends as having the body of a lion and the beak of an eagle, "was based on illiterate nomads' observations of dinosaur skeletons in the deserts of Central Asia." And she tells of purely imaginary creatures of the classical period, such as the triton and the centaur. But her focus is on what the ancients made of the bones of real animals. Advances in classical studies and paleontology, she says, "now make it possible to restore the ancient fossil investigations to their rightful place in the history of science."

Ancient Greek vase where the monster seems to have the fossilized head of a dinosaur
>Adrienne Mayor is a palaeontologist and is kind of the first person who popularised the connection between mythology and fossils. So in places such as northern Africa, people would describe gryphons, which guarded gold in caves, as having the body of a mammal but the beak of a bird. And in this area they found the skeletons of Protoceratops: dinosaurs with bodies that look like a mammal and with a beak. Actually, these people weren’t making these things up: they were finding these fossils and explaining them in their own way.


>Folklorist and historian of science Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University has suggested that the exquisitely preserved fossil skeletons of Protoceratops and other beaked dinosaurs, found by ancient Scythian nomads who mined gold in the Tian Shan and Altai Mountains of Central Asia, may have been at the root of the image of the mythical creature known as the griffin. Griffins were described as lion-sized quadrupeds with large claws and a raptor-bird-like beak; they laid their eggs in nests on the ground.

>Greek writers began describing the griffin around 675 B.C., at the same time the Greeks first made contact with Scythian nomads. Griffins were described as guarding the gold deposits in the arid hills and red sandstone formations of the wilderness. The region of Mongolia and China where many Protoceratops fossils are found is rich in gold runoff from the neighboring mountains, lending some credence to the theory that these fossils were the basis of griffin myths.

>In 2016 this hypothesis was contested, as it ignores pre-Greek gryphon art and accounts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoceratops#Origin_of_griffin_myths

Myths of Griffin and sphinx are very old. But fossils are even older.

This book by Adrienne Mayor, cites examples where fossils were kept in temples so the ancients were at least aware of them. A lot of what she discusses is speculation, just taking literature and trying to derive the source of the monsters in it with no real evidence but its a start.

Check out the book the First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor.

She believes in evolution, while I don't, so we tend to disagree on the interpretation of the evidence, but the evidence itself is very interesting.
She mostly deals with historical finds, anachronisms and the like, and tries to explain them.