When you look at a dinosaur skeleton in a museum, what do you see? A T. rex. A triceratops. Maybe you think about Jurassic Park. Maybe you think about extinction. About millions of years and evolution and science.
But here’s a question that never occurred to me until I started researching this article: what did people see before there was such a thing as “paleontology”?
Before the word “dinosaur” was even invented (that happened in 1842, by the way). Before anyone knew that giant lizards once ruled the Earth. Before Darwin. Before all of it.
What did the first humans who stumbled upon a massive leg bone or a skull the size of a boulder think they were looking at?
The answer, it turns out, is remarkable. And it comes from the oral traditions of Native Americans, who encountered dinosaur and Ice Age fossils for thousands of years before Columbus ever set sail. They didn’t see extinct reptiles. They saw monsters. Giants. Thunder Birds. Water creatures that lived beneath the waves and died in great battles with sky spirits.
And here’s the really fascinating part: some of their explanations were so insightful that they anticipated modern scientific theories about extinction and deep time.
This is the story of the first fossil hunters. And they weren’t Victorian gentlemen with pickaxes and notebooks. They were the original Americans.
Part 1: The Forgotten Fossil Hunters
The burnt-red badlands of Montana’s Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements.
What did they make of these stone skeletons?
This is the question that historian and folklorist Adrienne Mayor set out to answer in her groundbreaking book, Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Mayor, who has a background in both classics and the history of science, had previously written about how ancient Greeks and Romans interpreted fossils. Then she turned her attention to the Americas.
What she found was astonishing.
Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters.
Mayor’s research took her across the continent, drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews. She traveled from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees.
The result is a book that represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.
Let me walk you through what she found, region by region.
Part 2: Big Bone Lick – Where It All Began
Let’s start in the East, in a place with a wonderfully descriptive name: Big Bone Lick, Kentucky.
This salt lick was a gathering place for Ice Age megafauna—mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, and other creatures that are now long gone. They came for the salt. And sometimes, they got stuck in the soft, boggy ground and died.
Over thousands of years, their bones accumulated.
When Europeans first arrived in the 18th century, they were stunned by what they found. President Thomas Jefferson, who had a passionate interest in paleontology (he kept mastodon bones in the White House, which is one of my favorite historical facts), sent expeditions to Big Bone Lick to collect specimens.
But Jefferson wasn’t the first. Not by a long shot.
Native Americans had known about Big Bone Lick for centuries. And they had their own explanations for the giant bones found there.
The local tribes—the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Miami—told stories of a race of great beasts that once roamed the land. According to their oral traditions, these creatures were so massive that they shook the ground when they walked. They were dangerous. They were feared.
And then, they were gone.
What happened to them? The stories varied, but a common theme emerged: the great beasts were destroyed by thunder and lightning sent by the sky spirits. In some versions, the Creator looked upon the monsters and decided they were too dangerous to share the Earth with humans. In others, a great hero or a band of warriors defeated them in a climactic battle.
Mayor notes that these stories show a sophisticated understanding of extinction—the idea that creatures that once lived are no longer here. That might seem obvious to us, but it’s not. For much of European history, people assumed that all creatures mentioned in ancient texts must still exist somewhere. The idea of extinction was controversial.
Native Americans, Mayor argues, had already grasped it. As she puts it, their insights were “so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories”.
Part 3: The Northeast – Giants, Great Bears, and Grandfather of the Buffalo
Moving north, Mayor documents fossil traditions among the Iroquois and other tribes of the Northeast.
One of the most striking stories comes from the Iroquois, who told of a race of giants who once lived in the region. These giants were not friendly. They were described as violent, cannibalistic, and terrifying. They stood taller than trees and could uproot oaks with their bare hands.
According to the tradition, the giants were eventually destroyed by the Creator, who sent a great flood to wipe them out. Only a few survived, and those survivors were diminished in stature—becoming the ordinary humans we know today.
Mayor connects these stories to the discovery of mastodon and mammoth bones in the region. The giants of Iroquois legend, she suggests, were inspired by the enormous fossil remains that the Iroquois people encountered in riverbeds and eroding hillsides.
There’s also a fascinating tradition about the “Grandfather of the Buffalo” —an enormous, primordial bison that was the ancestor of all modern buffalo. This creature was so large that its horns were said to be as wide as a man’s arm span. Its bones, when found, were used in rituals and medicine.
Modern paleontologists have identified a species called Bison latifrons, the giant bison, which stood over eight feet tall at the shoulder and had a horn span of up to seven feet. It went extinct around 20,000 years ago. The Iroquois never saw one alive. But they found its bones. And they created a story to explain them.
Part 4: New Spain – Bones of Fear and Birds of Terror
Now let’s travel south, to the region the Spanish called New Spain—Mexico and Central America.
Here, Mayor documents the fossil traditions of the Aztecs and their neighbors. And these stories are some of the most dramatic in the entire book.
The Aztecs told of the “quinametzin” —a race of giants who lived in the previous age of the world. According to Aztec cosmology, the world has gone through multiple “suns” or ages, each ending in catastrophe. The age of the giants ended when they were destroyed by a great flood or, in some versions, by jaguars.
When the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, they heard these stories from the Aztecs. They also saw giant bones being displayed in Aztec temples. The Spanish chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún recorded that the Aztecs believed these bones belonged to the quinametzin, the giants of old.
But the Aztecs weren’t just passively finding bones. They were collecting them.
Mayor documents that the Aztecs deliberately gathered fossils and kept them in special repositories. Some fossils were used in religious ceremonies. Others were ground into powder and used as medicine. This is one of the earliest documented examples of “fossil collecting” anywhere in the world.
Even more striking are the Aztec stories about “birds of terror” —enormous flying creatures that once darkened the skies. These were not birds as we know them. They had leathery wings, sharp beaks, and a taste for human flesh.
What were they describing? Mayor and other researchers have suggested that the Aztecs may have discovered fossils of pterosaurs—flying reptiles with wingspans of up to 40 feet. The remains of pterosaurs have been found in Mexico. It’s entirely plausible that the Aztecs uncovered their bones and incorporated them into their mythology.
Part 5: The Southwest – Fossil Fetishes and Monster Slayers
Moving further north, into the American Southwest, Mayor examines the fossil traditions of the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo peoples.
Here, the stories take a slightly different turn. Instead of focusing on giants or monsters, many Southwestern traditions focus on heroes who battled monsters in the distant past.
The Navajo, for example, tell stories of the Monster Slayer Twins, two heroic brothers who traveled the land killing the giant creatures that preyed upon humanity. Each monster they killed had a different appearance and different powers. Some had stone skin. Some had lightning in their eyes. Some could fly.
Mayor argues that these monsters correspond to different types of fossils that the Navajo would have encountered in the badlands of the Southwest—dinosaur bones, pterosaur remains, marine reptile fossils from when the region was covered by a shallow sea.
But here’s what’s really interesting. The Navajo also used fossils as “fetishes” —sacred objects with spiritual power. Certain types of fossilized bones, shells, and teeth were believed to have healing properties. They were carried as talismans, placed in medicine bundles, and used in curing ceremonies.
The fossilized remains of cretaceous oysters (the extinct relative of modern oysters, which lived in the ancient sea that once covered the Southwest) were particularly prized. They were seen as symbols of the primordial ocean and were used in rituals related to water and rain.
This practice continues to this day. Even now, some traditional Navajo healers will use fossil shells and bones in their ceremonies—a direct, unbroken line of tradition stretching back centuries.
Part 6: The Prairies – Fossil Medicine and Spirit Animals
On the Great Plains, Mayor found a different relationship with fossils. Here, the primary fossils are not dinosaurs (though those exist in the badlands of the Dakotas and Nebraska) but Ice Age megafauna—mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, and ancient horses.
The tribes of the Plains—the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Sioux, the Crow—used fossils for medicine and hunting magic.
One of the most fascinating practices involved “buffalo-calling stones” . These were fossil shells and stones that the Plains tribes believed had the power to attract buffalo herds. The stones were kept in special bundles and used in rituals before major hunts.
Why would anyone think a fossil could attract buffalo? Mayor suggests that the connection may have been visual. Many fossils—especially certain types of fossil shells and corals—have patterns that resemble the hump or horns of a buffalo. By a kind of sympathetic magic, the object that looked like a buffalo could draw real buffalo to the hunters.
The Pawnee, in particular, had elaborate traditions about fossilized marine creatures found far from any ocean. They recognized that the land had once been underwater. Their oral traditions described an ancient sea that covered the plains, filled with strange creatures that no longer existed.
This is remarkable. The Pawnee, with no formal training in geology, had deduced that the Great Plains were once an ocean floor. Modern science confirms they were right. The region was submerged under the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago.
That knowledge was passed down orally for generations.
Part 7: The High Plains – Thunder Birds, Water Monsters, and Buffalo-Calling Stones
In the High Plains of Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, Mayor found some of the richest fossil traditions in North America.
This is dinosaur country. The badlands of the Hell Creek Formation contain some of the most productive fossil beds in the world—T. rex, triceratops, and dozens of other species.
The Sioux, the Crow, and the Blackfeet who lived in this region could not avoid encountering dinosaur bones. They were everywhere, eroding out of hillsides and riverbanks.
And they had names for what they found.
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“Thunder Birds” : These were the fossils of pterosaurs and large birds. The Sioux believed that thunder was caused by the beating of enormous wings. The Thunder Birds were powerful spirits that could shoot lightning from their eyes.
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“Water Monsters” : These were the fossils of marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, found far from any modern ocean. The Blackfeet told stories of great horned serpents that lived in the rivers and lakes of the ancient world.
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“Giant Lizards” : This was the term for dinosaur fossils. The Crow called them the “grandfathers of the buffalo”—ancient creatures that preceded the modern animals.
One of the most detailed accounts comes from the Blackfeet tradition of the “Underwater People” —a race of creatures who lived beneath the surface of lakes and rivers. These creatures had long bodies, horns, and the ability to control the weather. They were dangerous, and traditional Blackfeet avoided places where their bones were found.
Mayor connects these stories to the fossils of plesiosaurs—long-necked marine reptiles that grew up to 40 feet long. Their skeletons do look like something that might be described as a “horned water serpent”.
Part 8: What Makes This Remarkable – Sophisticated Insights
Now, let me pause here and highlight what’s so extraordinary about these traditions.
Mayor argues, and I think she’s right, that Native American fossil traditions demonstrate sophisticated insights that anticipate modern scientific theories. Let me give you some examples.
1. The Concept of Extinction
As I mentioned earlier, the idea that species could go extinct was controversial in Europe until the early 19th century. Many naturalists believed that God would not allow any of his creations to disappear. Fossils, they argued, must belong to species that still existed somewhere in the unexplored corners of the world.
Native Americans, by contrast, had no such theological hang-ups. Their oral traditions are filled with stories of creatures that once existed and are no more. They understood extinction as a fact of life.
2. Deep Time
The concept of “deep time”—the idea that the Earth is millions or billions of years old—is a relatively recent scientific development. Before the 19th century, most Europeans believed the Earth was only a few thousand years old, based on biblical chronology.
Native American oral traditions, by contrast, often speak of events that happened in a “before time” or in previous “worlds” or “suns.” The Aztec cosmology of multiple ages, each ending in catastrophe, implicitly recognizes a time scale far beyond the few thousand years of European tradition.
3. Changing Landscapes
Many Native American traditions recognize that the landscape has changed dramatically over time. The Pawnee knew that the Great Plains had once been underwater. The Blackfeet knew that there were once creatures living in the region that no longer existed. The Iroquois knew that giant beasts had once roamed their forests.
This understanding of a changing Earth—of continents that were once submerged, of climates that were once different, of animals that once lived and died—is essentially the same insight that led to the development of modern geology.
4. The Extraterrestrial Impact Theory
Here’s the most startling example. Some Inca legends describe a catastrophe that destroyed the giant beasts—a “fire from heaven” that rained down and killed them.
That sounds a lot like the modern theory that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. And indeed, the Inca had no way of knowing about asteroids or impacts. They observed the fossils of extinct creatures and inferred that something catastrophic must have happened to them.
The word “catastrophe” is right there in the story. “Fire from heaven” destroying the monsters.
Mayor notes this parallel without overstating it. The Inca weren’t paleontologists. They didn’t have a theory about the Chicxulub impact. But their story—passed down for centuries—captured something true about the nature of extinction. It is often sudden. It is often violent. And it leaves behind only bones.
Part 9: Practical Uses – Fossils as Tools and Medicine
Beyond mythology, Native Americans put fossils to practical use.
Medicine
Throughout the continent, fossils were used in healing rituals. The powdered bones of extinct creatures were believed to have curative properties. Fossil shells were used in ceremonies for water and rain. Fossil teeth were carried as talismans against illness and injury.
Hunting Magic
As I mentioned earlier, “buffalo-calling stones” were used to attract herds. Other fossils were used in rituals to ensure a successful hunt. The fossil of a large animal, it was believed, could transfer its power to the hunter.
Tools and Ornaments
Fossilized shells were carved into beads and pendants. Fossilized bone was shaped into tools and weapons. Petrified wood—fossilized tree trunks—was used to make arrowheads and scrapers. These items have been found at archaeological sites across the continent, showing that fossils were valued resources.
Part 10: The Looting Tragedy – A Parallel to Spiro
Before I finish, let me draw a parallel to another story we’ve covered in this series.
Just as the Spiro Mounds were looted in the 1930s, many fossil sites have been looted over the years. But there’s a specific tragedy that Mayor documents in her book: the loss of Native American fossil traditions themselves.
When Europeans arrived, they didn’t ask Native Americans what they thought about the giant bones in the ground. They assumed that Native Americans had no knowledge of paleontology. They dismissed oral traditions as “myth” or “superstition” without ever investigating whether those traditions might contain genuine observations about the natural world.
It was only in the late 20th century that scholars like Mayor began to take these traditions seriously. And when they did, they found a rich body of knowledge that had been ignored for centuries.
Mayor’s Appendix, titled “Fossil Frauds and Specious Legends,” addresses the problem of hoaxes and misinterpretations. But she also makes clear that many of the traditions she documents are authentic and reliable.
The tragedy is not just that fossils were looted from the ground. It’s that the stories about them were almost looted from history.
Conclusion: The First Paleontologists
Here’s what I want you to take away from this.
Before there was any such thing as a “paleontologist,” there were Native Americans who found dinosaur bones, mammoth teeth, and marine reptile skeletons. They didn’t have laboratories or academic journals. But they had something else: curiosity, observation, and the human need to explain the world.
They looked at the giant bones in the ground and asked the same questions we ask today. What was this creature? How did it live? How did it die? Why is it no longer here?
And then they created answers. Not scientific answers, not in the modern sense. But answers that were thoughtful, consistent, and sometimes astonishingly prescient.
They saw dinosaurs and called them “Monster Bears” and “Giant Lizards.” They saw pterosaurs and called them “Thunder Birds.” They saw plesiosaurs and called them “Water Monsters.”
And they told stories about these creatures—stories that were passed down for generations, stories that preserved observations about extinction, deep time, and changing landscapes.
Adrienne Mayor’s work has given us a gift: a window into how the first Americans saw the prehistoric world. And what we see through that window is not primitive superstition. It’s sophisticated, thoughtful, and deeply human.
The next time you look at a dinosaur skeleton in a museum, remember that you’re not the first person to wonder about it. Others have been wondering for thousands of years. And their answers—in stories of Thunder Birds and Water Monsters, of giants and heroes—deserve to be remembered.
They were the first fossil hunters.
And their stories are still worth listening to.
