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sils appear to have directly contributed to the mythology of many civilizations, including the ancient Greeks. Classical Greek historian Herodotos wrote of an area near Hyperborea where gryphons protected golden treasure. There was indeed gold mining in that approximate region, where beaked Protoceratops skulls were common as fossils. A later Greek scholar, Aristotle, eventually realized that fossil seashells from rocks were similar to those found on the beach, indicating the fossils were once living animals. He had previously explained them in terms of vaporous exhalations, which Persian polymath Avicenna modified into the theory of petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus). Recognition of fossil seashells as originating in the sea was built upon in the 14th century by Albert of Saxony, and accepted in some form by most naturalists by the 16th century. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of "tongue stones", which he called gloss
opetra. These were fossil shark teeth, thought by some classical cultures to look like the tongues of people or snakes. He also wrote about the horns of Ammon, which are fossil ammonites, from whence the group of shelled octopus-cousins ultimately draws its modern name. Pliny also makes one of the earlier known references to toadstones, thought until the 18th century to be a magical cure for poison originating in the heads of toads, but which are fossil teeth from Lepidotes, a Cretaceous ray-finned fish. The Plains tribes of North America are thought to have similarly associated fossils, such as the many intact pterosaur fossils naturally exposed in the region, with their own mythology of the thunderbird. There is no such direct mythological connection known from prehistoric Africa, but there is considerable evidence of tribes there excavating and moving fossils to ceremonial sites, apparently treating them with some rever
