Vase shows that ancients dug fossils, too.

This painting on an ancient Corinthian vase may be the earliest record of a fossil find, says folklorist Adrienne Mayor of Princeton, N.J. Known as the Hesione vase, this object was created about 550 B.C. and depicts the Greek hero Herakles rescuing Hesione from the monster of Troy. The vase now resides in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Art scholars have generally interpreted the monster (yellow face at right) as a sea serpent emerging from a black cave, but Mayor and a group of paleontologists think the creature might actually be the fossil skull of an extinct giraffe eroding out of a hillside. Mayor's analysis of the vase painting appears in the February OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY.

Fossilized remains of large giraffes, camels, and horses are common throughout the Aegean Sea and in western Turkey. The ancient Greeks thought some of the large fossils they dug out were the bones of gods and monsters.

The skull of one of the prehistoric mammals may have been the model for the vase painting and the legend that it illustrates. The artist added a lizardlike eye socket and tongue to make the monster more fearsome. The disguise didn't fool Mayor. "It's so obvious once you know what you're looking for, "she says.