Figures of fantasy

NEW YORK - Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson and John Smith all recorded sightings of mermaids. Sea monsters populated the old ships' logs, too.

"The eye sees a fragment and the mind fills the rest," explains a placard near the entrance to "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids," a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History here. The creatures "give shape to humankind's greatest hopes, fears and most passionate dreams."

The exhibit pulls together drawings, maps and other renderings of mythological beings famous (Loch Ness monster) and obscure (hippocampus, bunyip and kappa). Much of the display is dedicated to scientific speculation on which living or extinct animals might have inspired these legendary birds, beasts, fish or combinations thereof.

"A lot of this came out of the role of fossils and what people originally thought about fossils," says paleontologist Mark Norell, a cocurator of the exhibit.

The ancients knew these were not the bones and footprints of ordinary animals, he says - so they must have been from exotics.

A central Asian dinosaur called protoceratops, for example, "bears an eerie resemblance to the head of a classical griffin."

A folklorist named Adrienne Mayor first drew the connection between the plant-eating beaked dinosaur and the mythical creature with a lion's body and the head of an eagle. For many years before modern paleontologists started digging up protoceratops fossils, the region was traversed by Scythian nomads who would almost certainly have noticed them, says Norell.

"The skulls were common and stuck up out of the ground."

Fossil bones from mammoths or dinosaurs probably looked to ancients like they came from giants. Regions with many such fossils often correspond to places the Greeks deemed battlefields of giants.

At the museum, visitors are led through rooms highlighting creatures of water, land and air, plus an obligatory section devoted to dragons.

Each part mixes fossils with dozens of paintings, textiles and cultural objects from around the world. A "life-sized" model dominates each, including a 17-foot dragon with a 19-foot wingspan.

Interactive exhibits allow children to rearrange scale models of mammoth bones to look like a giant human skeleton, and dinosaur bones to look like a griffin.

If this seems like a stretch, Mayor, who is also a historian and studies the science of myths, points out how depictions of the Greek Cyclops were probably inspired by elephant skulls. The gaping trunk cavity, which of course looks nothing like a trunk, could easily be confused with a monster's central eye socket.

Not all monsters are evil, and not every dragon breathed fire. The Chinese long considered their fictional giant reptiles to be wise and auspicious.

"Children wanted to be born in years of the dragon," Norell says.

And traders sometimes capitalized on mythology, collecting narwhal tusks from the North Sea and selling them as unicorn horns.

"Many of these creatures come from misreadings and missightings," says Laurel Kendall, an anthropologist and another curator of the exhibit. This was especially the case at sea, where much of what lurked beneath the surface was unknown.

Perhaps sailors, going for months or years without women, were prone to seeing perky female breasts on creatures that swam by. Indeed, mermaids may go back as far as lonely sailors - Pliny the Elder wrote of them in A.D. 77.

When Columbus spotted what may have been a manatee, he recorded his disappointment that mermaids were not as beautiful as he'd been led to believe, their faces looking more like old men than young women.

Capt. John Smith seemed more satisfied with his first mermaid.

"It has a finely shaped nose, well-formed ears, round eyes and long green hair, and is by no means unattractive," the seafaring Englishman reported, probably sometime before taking up with Pocahontas.

Some myths traveled the world inspiring other myths.

Africans saw mermaids carved on European bowsprits, and took them to be reflections of their own water spirits, says anthropologist Kendall. African art incorporated the European mermaid into its own native images. Today's African mermaids often decorate gambling parlors, where they symbolize good luck.

Sailors also recorded a menagerie of less inviting sea monsters. A 1585 map of Iceland shows a volcano-pocked land surrounded by creatures with fishlike bodies and heads like cows and horses.

Some sightings have turned out to be real.

In the Odyssey, Homer wrote of a giant creature called the Scylla. In the Middle Ages, Norwegian sailors recorded a huge tentacled monster they named the Kraken and blamed for sinking ships for pleasure.

Although Kraken's exploits were almost certainly exaggerated, both it and the Scylla are now thought to have been giant squid. (Though the museum says it couldn't fit in the exhibit, a specimen of the real giant squid is laid out elsewhere in the building in a giant formalin-filled coffin that is not open to the public. It is just a baby at 28 feet.)

It wasn't until the mid-1800s that the scientific world started believing in the existence of such creatures, says Richard Ellis, another curator and author of 1999's The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World's Most Elusive Sea Creature.

A Danish biologist named Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup first obtained a set of jaws and assigned the scientific name Architeuthis, for "ruling squid."

In 1861, French sailors saw huge tentacles breaking the surface and shot their muskets at them, Ellis says. They tried to lasso the creature but accidentally severed it with the rope and retrieved just a tentacle, which they brought to the French consulate in the Canary Islands. Since then, fishermen have hauled up dozens of dead giant squid, whole or in parts, but no one ever saw one alive until 2004, when Japanese researchers caught footage with underwater cameras.

Giant squid spend most of their time thousands of feet below the surface and probably never attacked ships, though they can be nasty when it comes to mating: The males shoot or inject sperm directly - hypodermic needle-style - into the tentacles of the females.

Though the squid turned out to be real, even monstrous, in a way, most other mythic creatures will probably remain just that despite some die-hards who continue to believe in, say, the abominable snowman.

"They're products of a world where we have nostalgia for exploration," says anthropologist Kendall, "where so much was unknown."

What: "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids."

Where: American Museum of Natural History, 79th Street at Central Park West, New York City.

When: Daily through Jan. 6, 2008.

Cost: $14 adults, $8 ages 2 to 12, $10.50 students.

Information: 212-769-5100 or www.amnh.org. EndText