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A long time before humans colonized Crete, the island that meant to be one of the birthplaces of civilization, a charming adventure had started, the leading part being played by nature itself. This adventure is the source of many of the myths which charmed or scared our ancestors. Beings from another world, looking like originating from nightmares, as people thought while looking at their fossils, in a similar way in which men of the Middle Age twisted those fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistorical animals, which they came across by chance, into stories about dragons, one-horned monsters and demons, till science replied to all the questions and dissolved the fog of delusion.
The fascinating story of changes which led to the current shape of Crete and the dominance of the master species, is completed piece by piece each time the paleontologists’ pickaxe reveals a hidden part of the puzzle.
One of the most important pieces was revealed around the area of Sitia, when a native brought to light the fossil of an animal, which the scientists of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Crete recognized as a “dino-“(=tremendous) beast, the “deinotherium gigantum”, a real giant of the family of elephants, as its Latin name denotes....
Stavros
Moudoufaris
Full
article (in Greek) in STIGMES issue no 77
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