Sphinx, Jackalope, Manticore, Griffin, Hippogriff.
All monsters made up of body parts from more than one animal.
We now call these hybrid monsters chimeras, owing to the original Chimaera of ancient
Greece.
A ridiculously impractical mythological monster, with three heads: a lion, a goat, and a snake,
which seems absurd, but then again, humans have been crafting these mythological creatures
for thousands of years.
In more ways than one.
When I say humans have crafted Chimeras for thousands of years...I mean hand crafted.
As in sewing dead bodies together.
The Ancient Romans displayed a “centaur” preserved in honey.
The figure was likely made from mummified human and horse remains.
The Romans also exhibited a puppet with a false human head attached to a large serpent
that could open and close its mouth and flick its snake tongue.
It fooled quite a few people.
And don’t even get me started on all the weird taxidermy trends in the Victorian period
.
But it’s not all jumbled up animals, and antlers glued to rabbits.
A real, living chimera of a sheep and a goat--a “geep”--was made in the 1980s.
Now I could try to explain all of this, and do a terrible job at it, but I’ll turn to
the esteemed Dr. Joe Hanson.
Joe, can you help me out here?
Ok, maybe you’ve heard of ligers?
Mules?
Beefalos?
Zonkeys, coydogs, wholphins, or maybe pizzly bears?
Those are all real examples of two animals combined into one.
But they’re not chimeras, biologically speaking.
They’re hybrid animals, one embryo that came from two related species mating, like
a lion and a tiger.
But the geep was different.
That started with two embryos, one goat and one sheep, that were combined to make one
embryo.
Two bodies or embryos combined into one?
That’s a chimera.
SCIENCE!
So scientists refer to these animals as chimeras, a concept with its roots deep in mythology.
Mythical hybrid animals have existed in cultures around the world for centuries.
It wasn’t until Homer’s Iliad, that the word “chimaera” first appears.
Here, The Chimaera is a female “beast” with the “upper body of a lion, the tail
of a snake, and a goat head in the middle of its torso.”
A fire-breathing goat head.
Yeahhh, it has three heads and the goat is the most threatening one.
In the story, Bellerophon is ordered to kill the Chimaera, a seemingly impossible task.
Luckily for our hero, his noble steed is none other than the winged horse Pegasus, which
helps him kill the Chimaera from above.
Pegasus?
Also, a chimera - lower case “c” chimera.
Go figure.
After Homer’s tale, other Greek writers followed with their own versions of the Chimaera
story.
Most set Chimaera’s home in Lycia; 500 long miles from Athens, a metaphor for the Greeks’
fear of the foreign, and what they saw as “uncivilized” territory.
It’s also a place known for mysteriously burning ground fires caused by natural gas
leaking to the surface, but to humans of the time, a fire breathing goat was just as likely.
The mountain where these fires burned was appropriately called Mount Chimaera.
So how the heck do we explain the inspiration for the lion/goat/serpent heads thing?
[Joe] We don’t see actual animal chimeras in the wild, but we do sometimes see certain
traits on one species that kind of appear to come from other species?
Like extra limbs, or how some humans have extra fingers that make them look kinda reptile-y.
And during development, many vertebrate embryos pass through stages that resemble more ancient
branches of life, like fish, complete with gill-looking growths… so that would be confusing
in olden dayes.
And finally, some animals can be born with multiple heads… though they’re always
the same kind of heads, so you gotta stretch the scientific truth to get to mythical chimeras.
One explanation for the creation of this odd three-headed creature might come from human
confusion of early fossil discoveries.
It’s possible that the fossilized bones of a goat, a lion, and a snake could have
been found in the same place, when they were killed by a flash flood or fell into a tar
pit., Humans discovered their fossilized remains together, and imagined a Chimaera to explain
what they saw.
There is a ton of ancient art that depicts the Chimaera, everything from coins and statues
to containers and plates
Because of its presence in The Iliad and other Classical Greek texts and art, the Chimaera
continued to be a recognizable myth as the centuries wore on.
The word “chimaera” came to signify not just a hybrid animal but any thing that seemed
to be impossible or a figment of the imagination.
Only over the last few decades have we been able to accept, and prove, that interspecies
chimeras are possible.
After the “geep,” another crazy moment in chimera history happened in 1998 when two
scientists tried to get a patent on a variety of human-animal chimeras.
And yes, they used that term specifically.
The patent was rejected as an invention that would be “injurious to the well-being, good
policy, or good morals of society,” and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office commissioner
reportedly even referred to these proposed creations as “monsters.”
But research into human-animal chimeras continues.
Some scientists are growing human tissues inside pigs in order to one day improve how
we transplant organs.
But the ethics and feelings surrounding this kind of research are… complicated.
I mean, in a world of human-animal chimeras…
What constitutes a human?
If I grew bird wings, would I be considered a human or a chimera?
As technology advances, the possibility of even human chimeras becomes real.
The world of biological chimeras is even weirder, so head over to Its Okay to be Smart and watch
Joe’s video to learn about that.
So we’ve come full circle.
From the impossible Chimaera monster of Greek mythology to the potential for real animal
chimeras.
When we move from the realm of fantasy into reality, things get much more complicated.
So it’s no longer just an exercise of imagination but a question about ethics.
We can craft chimeras, but should we?