Fossil Reptiles In Native American Folklore

[DD1991]

Has anyone come upon accounts of Native Americans finding dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles? I was reading a book about early dino discoveries in North America and I've heard of the Native American sand beast Seitaad (for which the prosauropod Seitaad is named). It's also interesting that the dubious tyrannosaur Dryptosaurus kenabekides is named after Kenabeek, a T. rex-like beast of Native American folklore. Would it reasonable to assume that the Native Americans occasionally came upon bones of dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles when they devised myths and legends of Native American monsters like Kenabeek and Seitaad?

Edited September 13, 2013 by DD1991

[Auspex]

There's an interesting book about this; Fossil Legends of the First Americans: LINK

[Ridgehiker]

Native societies varied a lot in structure, technology,etc

Not much of anything up here about natives and Dino's. All the so called legends are somewhat anecdotal and after the fact.

Here pre European natives were nomadic stone age hunters. No horses, metals, etc. Even petroglyphs here date from the introduction of the horse. There are large buffalo jumps in some areas of Cretaceous badlands One of these is 'Dry Island Buffalo Jump'...Scollard Formation where a T Rex etc. has been found. Another T Rex. Called 'Black Beauty' was found near another buffalo slaughter site.

Barnum Brown asked about Dino bones in what today is Dinosaur Provincial Park and the natives didn't seem to know anything. Dino bones are so plentiful that they were probably just debris and no value as they were to soft for stone tool use.

Sometimes Dino bones are depicted in documentaries as 'mother if the buffalo' but that's poetic license and not from any native source.

Edited September 13, 2013 by Ridgehiker

[painshill]

I can highly recommend Adrienne Mayor's very interesting book linked above. She also published this interesting article which explores place names describing fossils in oral tradition. A large part of it is devoted to Native American folklore.

Place Names Describing Fossils in Oral Tradition (Worldwide).pdf

[RichW9090]

Adrienne's book is one of my favorites, of course. Check out page 103.

Rich

[piranha]

Let's not forget our invertebrate friends. The Adrienne Mayor book also includes a section on: Timpe khanitza pachavee; the "little water bug in stone", long utilized as protective amulets by the Ute tribes. Drilled trilobites worn as amulets (as in the ancient burials) were called Shujji-pits napa t'schoy, "lizard foot bead things".

 

The oldest record of a trilobite talisman was discovered among cave paintings of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses by archaeologists in Yoone, France. The Grotte du Trilobite (Trilobite Cave) is dated at approximately 15,000 years old.

GROTTE DU TRILOBITE LINK

 

 

 

[newdog65]

there is a similar reference to trilobites found here in SE British Columbia, being discovered in an archaeology site 500 km away

See below

CN

Tanglefoot Creek Trilobites
Fossils are exceptionally rare in archaeological sites. A few examples have been documented from sites in Europe; none have previously been reported from Canada. The single documented example is a calcite wafer with a well-preserved trilobite that came from a Coast Salish site on the Fraser River, north of Yale. The fossil was associated with projective points, scrapers and knives of basalt and nephrite that appear to date from the last 2,000 years, but may be as old as 5,000 years. The Fraser River trilobite is identifiable as a species ofLabiostria, a rather obscure Late Cambrian trilobite about 510 million years old. This fossil is of additional interest because it could not have come from anywhere near the Fraser River or, indeed, from any locality in central British Columbia where all the rocks and fossils known are all much younger than Cambrian.

Cambrian rocks and fossils are widespread in B.C., but only in the eastern portion that was part of Laurentia, geological North America. When we (Chatterton and Ludvigsen, 1998) found out about the Fraser River trilobite, we had just started work on a remarkable collection of close to 4,000 specimens of Upper Cambrian trilobites that came from a single site on Tanglefoot Creek, east of Cranbrook. Like the specimen from the Fraser River, these trilobites were all complete specimens and preserved individually on calcite wafers. The Tanglefoot Creek site included more than 1,000 specimens of the identical species of Labiostria that was found in the archaeological site. The Fraser River trilobite must have come from Tanglefoot Creek, some 500 km to the east.

In all likelihood, the Fraser River trilobite was picked up from among the pebbles in Tanglefoot Creek hundreds or possibly thousands of years ago by a native traveller, presumably because it had curious and intriguing markings. It was probably considered to be a talisman that was carried or traded person to person across the Columbia Mountains and the entire Okanagan Plateau; eventually ending up at the site of the Fraser River north of Yale.

Calcite nodule with the trilobite
Labiostria from a Coast Salish
archaeological site on the Fraser River.
It was collected from shales on Tanglefoot Creek.
Photo by R. Ludvignsen
A moulted Labiostria from Tanglefoot Creek.
Photo by R. Ludvignsen

[AncientEarth]

Very cool info about the Tanglefoot specimens, never heard of that association to an archeo site.

[GordonC]

Recollection is that that ancient Chinese called it batstone.

G

[AmateurArtifacts]

I would think a lot of old civilizations discovered dino bones. It would explain the belief in dragons among many ancient cultures.