What's up top 10 fam hope you’re having an awesome day, Im your host Ayman Hasan and
welcome back to another video.
I love mythical creatures, i always believed they existed in some capacity even though
ive never seen any.
But i feel like the child inside you always wants to believe mermaids are real, dragons
are real, minotaurs and griffins are real and that our world isnt just as boring as
to have us in it.
And apparently its not.
These are the
Top 10 Scary Mythical Creatures That Were Found In Real Life.
Starting us off with number 10 is The Cyclops Polyphemus (pola-fee-mus).
Hear me out people.
This is real.
Now in Greek mythology, polyphemus was the cyclops son of Poseidon and Thoosa and hes
also in Homer’s Odyssey.
In the Ancient Greek times, fossils were abundant but the people also didnt have the knowledge
or know how to actually understand what they were looking at.
They told stories of savage giants because they found huge bones in the ground but really
those bones werent from giants.
Sicily was a hotbed for finding fossilized remains of giant prehistoric elephants and
mammoths but since the people didnt know what they were, they attributed them to giant humans
and well cyclopses.
The skeleton or even the skulls of any mammoth or mastodon (mas-ta-don) do have all the characteristics
of a mythical cyclops.
Their naval cavities were often damaged and so they looked like a massive centralised
hole in the skull which the Greeks easily mistook for a cyclops.
Cus i mean what else would be in the hole other than an eye.
So for many Ancient Greeks, the fictional fear of meeting a cyclops became very real
when they discovered these fossils and realised wait they actually are real and they do walk
among us.
When really false alarm theyre just mammoths.
Coming in at number 9 is The African Unicorn aka the Okapi (oh-kaa-pee).
Everytime i look at this animal i legit this its a case of photoshop like I always fail
to believe this is a natural animal.
Looks wise the okapi is mix of a zebra, a deer, a donkey and an antelope but genetically
its closest to a giraffe.
Which is already like 6 animals in one.
Their legs and neck are striped like a zebra, their ears and face resemble a deer but their
body shape looks donkeyish.
They are extremely rare and can only be found in the Ituri (i-too-ree) forest in central
Africa.
Now if we go back in time, the indigenous people of that area were aware of the okapis
existence but that was through indirect means like hoof prints and poop not by actually
seeing one.
When Europeans came to Africa they all believed the okapi was a myth told by the indigenous
people, they called it an african unicorn cus they just failed to believe it and because
the okapi hid from them so easily.
It retained its mythical status to the Europeans until 1901 when Sir Harry Johnston a zoologist
actually got his hands on an okapi skeleton and its skin and sent it back to Britain.
At number 8 we have The Basilisk.
Pspppspspps yes that was me communicating with one in parseltongue just now.
Dont worry you dont need to know what i just said to it.
Some things stay private yknow.
Anyway throughout history theres never been a shortage of stories or sightings of the
infamous basilisk.
Warsaw 1587 a 5 year old girl vanished and her mum and maid turned the town upside down
looking for her.
They ended up finding her stiff and still in the underground cellar of a house that
had been abandoned for 30 odd years.
The maid made her way down the stairs but before she could reach the bottom she froze
petrified.
Years and years later the story was told that the girl and maid never moved again because
they stared into the eyes of the basilisk.
The one beast on earth that could kill with just a look.
Now even before the Europeans, the Romans believed in them too.
They thought basilisks lived abundantly in Cyrene (sy-ree-nee) which is present day Libya.
Pliny (plin-ee) the Elder wrote that no man on earth could ever kill the beast since it
left a trail of poison wherever it went and if someone even tried stabbing it, the poison
would drip onto his own weapon and end his life.
And to be honest the basilisk was a real animal, or most likely the exaggerated version of
one.
Libya does have a lot of cobras that spit out poison so its quite likely that stories
of their poisonous spit was exaggerated and in a chinese whispers fashion turned into
these snakes that could kill just by looking at you.
Filling our number 7 slot are Mermaids.
We all know what mermaids are, half female half fish creatures that are present in pretty
much every countries folklore.
People all over the world reported sightings of these creatures coming out of the sea,
even Christopher Columbus in 1493 wrote that he saw 3 mermaids which rose well out of the
sea, but they are not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine
traits.
First of all rude.
Secondly, i love how people back then believed more in magic and folklore and legend than
people do now.
Like we’ve declined as a species for sure.
People thought they were real and i mean they are.
But it was never mermaids people were seeing they were manatees.
So im pretty sure columbus needed glasses or jesus because masculine traits?
They didnt even look human.
What is mans saying.
The sightings he and others saw were most likely manatees performing tail stands which
lets them rise vertically out of the water.
Their jointed forelimbs let them actually hold things and bring food their their mouth
and swim so i feel like from far away it became easy for travellers to mistake that as a human
eating or treading water.
And thus mermaids were born.
Now at number 6 are the Giant Savage Man Beasts.
Isnt that just man in general?
I said what i said.
Back in the 16th century people were being told stories of gigantic hairy man beasts
with horrible tempers living in the wild all over the world.
And since you had no internet at the time you couldnt exactly debunk the story even
if you wanted to.
The explorer Andrew Battel told people at home that monsters used to visit his campsite
after all the humans had left.
Which i dont even know how he knew if he wasnt there himself but okay Andrew.
Well turns out these savage hairy man beasts werent myth or legend they were real and they
were gorillas.
You see gorillas were obscure up until 1847 when naturalist Thomas Savage finally obtained
some gorilla bones in Liberia and this new species was found.
Coming in at number 5 is Bigfoot.
Good ol bigfoot i feel like its tradition by now for it to make an appearance at least
once a twice a month on the channel.
Like its bigfoot cmon people.
Very popular in North American folklore, this creature was said to be ape like creatures
that walk upright and live in the wilderness as we all know.
Despite scientists insisting bigfoot is not real I a qualified nonscientist beg to differ.
Over the years there have been more than 1000 sightings of bigfoot as well as pictures and
i know they cant all be real but i do believe some of them are.
In a 2014 poll done by the Associated Press, more Americans believe in bigfoot than they
do the big bang theory.
So theres that.
What do we think?
Real or truly mythical?
At number 4 is RELEASE THE KRAKEN.
And frankly that wouldve been the biggest missed opportunity if i didnt start with that.
To be fully honest with you guys i had never heard of a kraken until i saw Pirates of The
Carribbean Dead Mans Chest and Davy Jones brought out the kraken.
A kraken is a gigantic cephalopod sea monster which in essence just translate to a giant
squid.
People have been insisting the kraken is real for centuries, in the 18th century a Norweigan
bishop by the name of Erik Pontoppidon (pontop-idin) said it was not a myth from any angle since
Norweigan fishermen had seen it with their own eyes.
Apparently when they row out miles into open water the kraken was usually at the bottom
of the sea.
There would be a bubbling in the water, then all the nearby fish would make a swim for
it and then it would rise from the depths surrounded with seaweed.
It was the scariest creature in the ocean and it was as big as 10 warships.
And honestly the fishermen who saw these things may not have been fully wrong.
In real life there is actually no animal as big as a kraken but giant squids are 100%
a thing.
Those things can grow up to 600 pounds and be anywhere from 43 to 46 meters long.
Filling our number 3 slot is King Kong.
The origin story of King Kong is the biggest plot twist ever like i had no idea.
Before there was king kong, there was the komodo dragon.
Rumours of an enormous prehistoric lizard roaming the islands of Indonesia were ride
in the 20th century.
And youd think people wouldve noticed an 8 foot long, 100 pound reptile quite easily
but youd be wrong.
It took until 1910 when Dutch lieutenant Steyn van Hensbroek (stine) decided enough was enough
and went on an expedition to Komodo island himself.
There he caught and killed a 6 foot specimen and brought it back to Java. but that wasnt
good enough for American explorer W. Douglas Burden who went back there 15 years later
because he wanted to bring 2 specimens back to America.
Alive.
That was a shitshow and he ended up killing a bunch of them but he did manage to bring
back 2 alive.
When he got back though, he told the whole story to Merian C Cooper who also happened
to be a film producer.
Substitute an ape for the komodo dragon and voila you get the movie king kong.
So i mean really, king kong was based off a completely real creature.
Now at number 2 are Unicorns.
They are real guys they are.
Described as a majestic beast wiht a single spiralling horn coming out of its forehead.
The people in the Indus Valley Civilisation mentioned it, the ancient Greeks mentioned
it during accounts of natural history, its present in european folklore.
In the middle ages, the renaissance heck the bible even mentions an animal called the re’em
which some versions translate it to unicorn.
Now imagine living in whatever year BC without internet or anything and having to explain
what a rhinoceros is to someone on the other side of the world that doesnt speak the same
language as you.
During the 5th century BC a greek physician called Ctesias (tee-sias) went to the royal
court of Persia whos location brought together both sides of eurasia meaning everyone shared
information.
He wrote about the indian ass, a four legged beast with a single horn that came with its
own healing properties.
And that indian ass he was describing was a rhinoceros but it translated into a unicorn.
And i mean really rhinos are just the thiccer versions of unicorns anyway.
And finally at number 1 are Mummies.
And theyre probably the realest thing on this list and i mean by definition it literally
means a dead animal or human whose organs and skin have been preserved.
In a lot of western fiction theyve always been depicted as dead people who reanimate
as mummies.
The whole curse of the mummy myth actually originated from 19th century european archaeologists
not the ancient egyptians.
We’ve excavated enough tombs over the years to confirm that mummies are real and i mean
there have been curses associated with some of these tombs.
The biggest and deadliest one being that was unleashed after we excavated King Tutankhamun.
He took down so many people while dead so i mean this myth checks out in every aspect
except the reanimation part.