Bones  and all

Map of Ancient Peloponnese Greece

The Battle of the Fetters, c. mid-6th century BC, the Spartans met great defeat. They consulted the Oracle of Delphi, which told them to find the bones of the hero Orestes. They were unable to do so.

Then Lichas, a retired Spartan cavalryman, was in Tegea. He struck up a conversation with a smith, who told him about something strange he had found: a huge coffin—seven cubits long. Lichas then pretended to be an exile and leased a room. Secretly, he dug up the grave.

Sparta triumphed, boasting the recovery of “Orestes’s bones.”

It was, of course, not the bones of the hero. Most historians and paleontologists now believe they were those of a Pleistocene mammoth.

But in a way, that mistake is the most interesting part of the story.

This was the beginning of an ancient bone rush. The mania spread. The Greeks did not have the knowledge we have today. The bones looked human—but larger, stranger. If they had horns, beaks, or impossible limbs, that only confirmed it. Heroes and giants were never meant to look like ordinary men.

And so, long before palaeontology became a science, people were already digging.

Searching.

Imagining.

Bones were not just remains. They were stories waiting to be told.

But Greece was not the only place people found strange bones. Across the world, in ancient China, the stories were different.

Song Dynasty edition of I Ching (c.1100)

The I Ching – an ancient Chinese divination text– records an omen: “Dragons encountered in the fields.” For centuries, readers wondered what it meant.

Then farmers plowing their fields found bones in the soil. Giant ribs. Strange teeth. Skeletons of creatures no one had ever seen alive.

They didn't have our words— palaeontology, fossils, extinction. So they did what humans have always done with things they don't understand.

They told a story: Dragons.

For centuries, these "dragon bones” or “long gu" were ground into medicine. Traded across the country. Used to cure fevers, fatigue, fear. The farmers kept digging. Generation after generation. They developed techniques — pulleys, baskets, labels. They became experts at finding bones. They knew, eventually, that some of these bones belonged to horses, deer — familiar animals. 

They could see it. But they still called them dragons.

Because the story was older than the knowledge. Because the name carried meaning — medicine, money, myth. Because sometimes, what we call a thing matters more than what it is.

In 1885, imperial customs recorded twenty tons of dragon bones exported from China. Untold more were used within the country. When Western scientists finally traced the source, they found fossil beds rich with extinct species — ancient horses, strange deer, creatures that hadn't walked the earth for millions of years.

They called it a scientific discovery. But the farmers had already lived it.

People have always found bones. And people have always turned them into stories.

But bones only remain beneath us. Yet we give them meanings.        

What Bones Can’t Tell Us   

Skeletal Photos of One Extinct, and One Alive. 

Two skeletons. One is a rabbit. One is a dinosaur.

Which is which?

Look closely. The size is similar. The shape, the curves, the hands — they could almost be the same creature. Almost.

But one still hops through fields. The other has been gone for 150 million years.

If you guessed wrong, that's okay!

Because without context — without fur, without muscle, without movement — bones are just shapes. Puzzles. Silhouettes of something that used to be alive.

We can watch the rabbit hop. We can watch crows remember faces. We can track whales across oceans. The compsognathus? We have its bones. That's it.

That is the ache of palaeontology.

Not knowing everything.

Everything about the lives of ancient species must be inferred, often from limited evidence. Always with at least a grain — and sometimes a full cellar — of salt.

But the ache is not failure. It is where the art begins.

It makes us wonder.

We test our guesses. We compare to living animals. We ask: is this tooth strong enough to break bone?

There is science here. There is knowing. Just not everything. That gap — between what we know and what we wonder — is where the art lives.

Fossils are one of the earth's ways of remembering.

Even when bones disintegrate, the earth still holds them.

Not as bone. Not as fossil. Just as dust. Still beneath us. Still part of the earth.

They are memories.

Rock Collection

I have my own memories too. My rock collection. I remember having 5 of them, one was even an ammonite but I can never be so sure. Still, I named them:Pointy, Bong, Kikay, Barney, and the ammonite is Besty. Not the best names, but they were cute for my 8 year old self. I held them. I felt like I owned them even if they were probably older than me and my entire ancestry. 

Well…I don’t have them anymore. Moved too many times. Grew up. Lost them somewhere along the way.

Gone. Like everything that once was.

That’s the grief of it. Not just that things die. But that we forget them. That we lose them. 

My rocks are gone, like so many things we forget: it is important for us to look back.

Look back and wonder. Look back and dig. 

As you do, beneath you— even everywhere— you will find: 

Bones and all.

Sources:

Dinosaurs and dragons, Oh my! | Stanford Humanities Center. (n.d.).

https://shc.stanford.edu/stanford-humanities-center/news/dinosaurs-and-dragons-oh-my 

Stromberg, J. (2013, November 16). Where did Dragons come from? Smithsonian Magazine. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/where-did-dragons-come-from-23969126/ 

Romano, M. (2024). Fossils as a source of myths, legends and folklore. Rendiconti

Online

della Società Geologica Italiana, 62, 103–117. https://doi.org/10.3301/ROL.2024.11 

Battle of the Fetters. (n.d.).

https://ancientgreekbattles.net/Pages/57050_BattleOfTheFetters.htm 

Koon, W. K., & Koon, W. K. (2025, January 10). Reflections | How ‘dragon bones’

shed new

light on China’s history and its ancient societies. South China Morning Post.

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3284646/how-dragon-bones-shed-new-light-chinas-history-and-its-ancient-societies    

Britannica Editors. (n.d.). Compsognathus. Encyclopædia Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/animal/Compsognathus 

Books:

Mayor, A. (2023). The first fossil hunters: Dinosaurs, mammoths, and myth in Greek

and

Roman times. Princeton University Press. 

Hone, D. (2024). Uncovering dinosaur behavior: What they did and how we know. Princeton University Press.

Pictures:

ClipArtMag. (n.d.). Rabbit skeleton drawing [Image]. ClipArtMag.

https://clipartmag.com/downloadpage/image/rabbit-skeleton-drawing-26.jpg/1633846 

Harry’s Greece Travel Guides. (n.d.). Map of Ancient Peloponnese, Greek mainland [Map]. Greece

Athens & Aegean Info. https://www.greeceathensaegeaninfo.com/h-maps/greek-mainland/map- 

ancient-peloponnese.htm   

Psychic Today. (2021, February 22). I Ching image [Image]. Psychic Today.

https://psychictoday.com/blog/2021/02/22/iching-closer-look-nigel/  (psychictoday.com)

Strauss, B. (2025, April 30). Compsognathus illustration [Image]. ThoughtCo.

https://www.thoughtco.com/things-to-know-compsognathus-1093780  (thoughtco.com)