China’s Dinosaur Folklore

Even before we knew what they really were, dinosaurs inspired our imagination. Unidentifiable bones and tracks formed the basis of legend–they were the evidence of great battles, fearsome monsters and times when the world was new and hostile to human existence. Indeed, contrary to what John Noble Wilford wrote in The Riddle of the Dinosaur, fossilized bones were not just ignored or ground up for “dragon-bone medicine” in the centuries prior to the scientific discovery of dinosaurs. People have puzzled over dinosaurian fossils for centuries. Some of that folklore still persists today.

In a paper recently published in Ichnos, researchers Lida Xing, Adrienne Mayor, Yu Chen, Jerald Harris and Michael Burns focus on one particular source of dinosaur-inspired myths–trackways found in China. Just as dinosaur tracks in New England generated tales about primeval monsters, huge turkeys and ostrich-like birds, the tracks in China motivated the creation of different stories to explain just what left such imposing footprints.

According to the new study, Chinese folklore about dinosaur tracks can be divided into four categories–mythical birds, mammals, plants, and gods or heroes. In the case of three-toed theropod tracks discovered in Chabu, Inner Mongolia, for example, the footprints had been known to local farmers since the 1950s and were believed to be footprints of a “divine bird.” As explained by Xing and co-authors, “The herders believed that the tracks represented beautiful wishes for human happiness left by the sacred bird Shen Niao.” This is a common theme across sites where theropod tracks are found. Three-toed dinosaur footprints have often been interpreted as the steps of birds, and other sites in Heibei, Yunnan, Guizhou and Liaoning provinces have been attributed to other mythical birds, such as the golden and heavenly chickens.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2012/01/chinas-dinosaur-folklore/