4 ms·

I believe Cyclops myths were inspired by the skulls of dwarf elephants who lived on the island of Sardinia. https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/01/28/cyclops-ancien

• deleted 3y ago
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• adolph 3y ago
  At first I thought the dwarf elephants would have come as a result of the Zanclean megaflood [0] of 5m years ago, which did cause some odd sized animals like the small dog sized rabbit Nuralagus [1], but the Mediterranean dwarf elephants did not appear until 2.5m years ago [2]. 0. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-zanclean-megaflood https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-zanclean-m... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuralagus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuralagus 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_elephant
  • jacobolus 3y ago
    Dwarf elephants have appeared separately in multiple places and times when full-sized elephants got stranded somewhere and their habitat / food supply was restricted. There were dwarf mammoths in the California channel islands until pretty recently (a mammoth presumably swam from the mainland when the sea level was lower and they were one big island).
    • kombookcha 3y ago
      For more non-elephant examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_dwarfism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_dwarfism