7 Mythical Creatures That Were Based on REAL Extinct Animals

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:07]The connection between prehistoric animals and mythological creatures extends well beyond the most commonly cited examples. Ancient human populations interacted with or encountered the remains of a far broader range of extraordinary species than the modern world contains. This installment examines five additional mythological [music] figures drawn from Norse, Greek, Native American, and modern scientific folklore and identifies the prehistoric species [music] that most plausibly gave rise to each of them. Number five, Fenrir and the direwolf. Norse mythology features Fenrir, of extraordinary size whose power is considered a direct threat to the Norse [music] gods themselves. A fictionalized version of this creature appeared in modern popular culture through the Marvel Cinematic Universe's [music] Thor: Ragnarok. Giant wolves appear in multiple additional mythological traditions, suggesting a cross-cultural [music] awareness of unusually large wolf-like predators. The prehistoric species most relevant to this mythology is the direwolf, Canis Dirus. Direwolves lived during the Pleistocene epoch and were approximately 25% larger than modern gray wolves in terms of body mass. They were among the dominant predators of the Ice Age, capable of hunting the large megafauna, mammoth, ground sloths, and giant bison [music] that populated North America and South America during that period. The extinction of the direwolf is directly tied to the collapse of its food source.

[00:01:24]As the Ice Age ended approximately 10,000 years ago, the megafauna populations on which direwolves depended declined rapidly, primarily due to a combination of climate change and overhunting by expanding human populations. With their primary prey gone, direwolves could not sustain their populations and eventually disappeared.

[00:01:42]Notably, the gray wolf, smaller and more adaptable species, survived the same period because of its ability to exploit a wider [music] range of prey. Number four, the four-tusked elephant of Hindu mythology. Hindu religious tradition includes depictions of Airavata, a mythological elephant described as [music] the mount of the deity Indra.

[00:01:58]Unlike modern elephants, Airavata is portrayed with four tusks. [music] Similar multi-tusked elephants appear in the Ramayana and other ancient Indian texts. The prehistoric animal that corresponds to these descriptions is Gomphotherium, a genus of Proboscidea, the taxonomic group that includes modern elephants, mastodons, and mammoths that lived between 23 million and 2 million [music] years ago. Gomphotherium is classified as a relative of modern elephants rather than a direct ancestor.

[00:02:24]What distinguished Gomphotherium from modern elephants was its [music] tusk configuration. In addition to the standard upper tusks, Gomphotherium possessed a second set of tusks in its lower jaw, which extended forward and were used in a shovel-like fashion to gather vegetation. At the time Gomphotherium existed, the human lineage had evolved only as far as Homo Erectus, an early human [music] species with a significantly smaller brain than modern humans. It is possible, and in the view of some researchers plausible, that fossil discoveries of Gomphotherium as skulls by early inhabitants of the Indian [music] subcontinent contributed to the mythological tradition of multi-tusked elephants that became codified in Hindu religious texts.

[00:03:02]Number three, the Griffin and Haast's eagle. The Griffin is a mythological creature of ancient Greek and Near Eastern origin and typically depicted as a hybrid of a lion and an eagle, the dominant land predator combined with the dominant aerial [music] predator.

[00:03:15]Griffins appear consistently across Greek, Persian, and Mesopotamian artwork and [music] literature. The leading scholarly hypothesis for the origin of the Griffin is that ancient populations discovered the fossilized skulls of ceratopsian [music] dinosaurs, horned, beaked dinosaurs related to Triceratops, in the deserts of Central Asia and interpreted them as evidence of a creature combining [music] avian and leonine features. There is, however, a real animal that requires no mythological embellishment. Haast's eagle, Hieraaetus moorei, [music] lived in New Zealand until approximately 1400 CE, fewer than 700 years ago. It was the largest eagle species ever documented, with a wingspan [music] reaching approximately 10 ft and a body weight sufficient to prey on moa, the tallest [music] bird species in recorded history. Moa individuals reached weights of approximately 550 [music] lb. Haast's eagles were capable of striking prey at high speed and killing animals many times [music] their own weight. When the Maori people arrived in New Zealand around 1300 CE, they encountered Haast's eagle as a living predator. Maori oral tradition contains accounts of a giant eagle known [music] as Te Hokioi that attacked humans.

[00:04:21]Haast's eagle went extinct following the Maori hunting of moa to extinction, which eliminated its primary food source. Number two, the Bloop and Leedsichthys. In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded an underwater sound of exceptional volume in the Pacific Ocean.

[00:04:41]The sound, informally named the Bloop, was audible across a distance [music] roughly equivalent to the distance between Nepal and Japan. Initial analysis suggested that no known biological organism [music] could produce a sound of that intensity.

[00:04:53]Speculation arose that the source was an undiscovered [music] deep-sea creature of enormous size, potentially larger than a blue whale by a factor of 100. This speculation generated significant public interest and gave rise to a modern folkloric creature around the Bloop's supposed origin. Subsequent scientific investigation determined that the sound was produced by the fracturing of large Antarctic icebergs, not by any living animal. The prehistoric animal most often invoked in discussions of the Bloop legend is Leedsichthys problematicus, [music] the largest bony fish in the fossil record. Leedsichthys lived during the Jurassic period and reached lengths of up to 55 ft. [music] Despite its size, it was not a predator. Like modern baleen whales, it was a filter feeder, consuming plankton and small organisms by swimming with its mouth open. If a living organism were to produce the acoustic output initially attributed to the Bloop, Leedsichthys represents the closest biological precedent [music] in terms of scale. No evidence exists that any organism comparable to Leedsichthys has survived into the modern era. Number one, giant sacred bovids and Bison latifrons. Oversized cattle, buffalo, and bison figure prominently in the sacred traditions of multiple cultures.

[00:05:56][music] Greek mythology features the Minotaur, a human-bull hybrid of exceptional power. Native American spiritual traditions have historically attributed great [music] significance to the bison. Hindu religious tradition holds cattle as sacred animals of considerable importance. These traditions have led some researchers to ask whether they reflect a cultural memory of encountering genuinely exceptional [music] bovid species in prehistory. The prehistoric species most relevant to this question is Bison latifrons, commonly known as the giant bison or long-horned bison. Bison latifrons lived across the North American continent during the Pleistocene epoch and was the largest bovid ever to inhabit North America. Its body mass was comparable to that of a standard SUV, [music] and the distance between the tips of its horns was sufficient to accommodate another vehicle of the same size. [music] Bison latifrons evolved approximately 200,000 years ago from a smaller Eurasian ancestor, the steppe bison, which is still occasionally recovered from Siberian permafrost. The extinction of Bison latifrons, like that of the direwolf, coincided with the end of the Ice Age and the rapid decline of North American megafauna. Both climate change and human hunting pressure contributed to its disappearance. [music] Its much smaller descendant, Bison bison, survived and remains present in North America today in managed populations.

[00:07:08][music] Conclusion, the creatures examined in this installment, the Norse Fenrir, the four-tusked elephants of Hindu mythology, the Griffin, the Bloop, and the giant sacred bovids, each correspond to prehistoric species with documented fossil records. In several cases, the geographic overlap between the mythological tradition and the known range of the prehistoric animal is precise. The pattern that emerges across both this installment and the previous one is consistent. Ancient and even relatively recent human populations encountered extraordinary animals, and those encounters were preserved in cultural memory through mythological frameworks.