May 30, 2022 • 9 mins
The cave bear is more than just a monster variant on MM 334. It's the source of piles of dragon bones in caves all over Europe, and fulcrum where archaeology turned from fantasy to science.
Get three extinct animals raised to life as monsters in D&D: https://www.scintilla.studio/extinction
Get stat blocks, bonus content, and other monstrous perks: www.patreon.com/scintillastudio
Join the conversation: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter
"Extinction Theme" by Alexandre Miller, The Boy King of Idaho
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Lucas (00:00):
Here's your extinction story
for the week (00:01):
dragon bones piled by
the hundreds in caves all over Europe.
Hello and welcome to Making a Monster:
Extinction, the stories of extinct animals
(00:21):
retold as Dungeons and dragons monsters.
I'm Lucas Zellers I'm your host.
And I'm gathering these stories into a
bestiary called Book of Extinction coming
to Kickstarter in November of 2020.
This episode might be a little bit
different than what you're used to.
Making a Monster is the surprising
history behind monsters written for
Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop
RPGs, and Making a Monster (00:42):
Extinction
was meant to show you how I'm going
through the process of mythologizing,
extinct animals for Dungeons and Dragons.
My goal is highly-produced, highly-edited
interviews with experts on the
particular animals I'm working with.
And I still plan to do episodes like that.
I'm working on episodes for the
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet,
but if I want Book of Extinction to be
(01:04):
everything it can be, occasionally the
expert I'll be consulting is just me.
In at least the case of the Florida
fairy shrimp, Book of Extinction may
contain the largest body of extant
literature on a given species.
So I'm willing to claim that
title, at least in so far
as the podcast requires it.
And as an expert, I believe I have
a unique point to make about the
(01:25):
intersection of conservation in D
and D and digging up dragon bones.
The monster manual has a hierarchy
of bears (01:32):
black bear brown
bear, polar bear and cave bear.
The last is just the polar bear,
but with dark vision, but in
true "Making a Monster" style,
there's way more to it than that.
Over the last month I've been working
on Pleistocene megafauna, giant animals
gone extinct in the geological epic
previous to the one in which we live.
(01:52):
These are the original dire creatures
like dire wolves and yes, cave bears,
the oversized animals who lived
before the current geological era.
And at first I thought doing this
work would detract from my point,
which is the urgent and tragic
loss of a mind-boggling amount of
biodiversity within your lifetime.
(02:14):
And time does create a psychological
distance from the problem, so that the
extinction of the giant ground sloths
or wooly mammoth, it doesn't cause
nearly the level of emotional turmoil
as that of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
But I think there's another point to
be made by embracing that timescale.
We don't get good fantasy literature
without a world packed with biodiversity,
(02:36):
and I can use dragon bones to prove it.
From Cyclops to Godzilla, to
jaws, giant creatures form the
backbone of the monster ecosystem.
In fact, one of the many meanings of
the word monster is "huge" because at
a certain point, sheer size is enough
to recontextualize a human's perceived
place in the food chain from predator.
(02:56):
Or perhaps to paramecium, a creature
so comparatively small, it has beneath
the notice of the food chain entirely.
And it's no coincidence that the fiction
in Appendix N, the works that inspired
Dungeons and Dragons, was largely written
against the backdrop of the natural
history boom of the late 18 hundreds when
natural historians, fossil collectors,
(03:18):
and archeologists inspired the"gentleman
explorer" archetype that would later
be personified in Indiana Jones.
In a lot of cases, these
gentlemen explorers were looking
at the fossils of megafauna.
We've talked about Cyclops skulls in Crete
and Griffin bones in the Gobi desert.
And although I have heard of objections
to those examples, they do illustrate
(03:39):
the turn of natural history from fantasy
to fact to extinction, and dragon bones
are the fulcrum on which it happened.
In the 16 and 17 hundreds, the bones
of cave bears were discovered in
droves, in caves all over Europe.
The scientific discourse of the
day argued over whether they
belonged to apes, candids fields,
or even dragons or unicorns.
(04:01):
And as they were drawn in the historical
journals at the time, they were often
called, in all seriousness, dragon bones.
Some examples are “De draconum
Carpathicorum cavernis” by P.J.
Hain from 1672 and “Antra
draconum Liptovensis” by F.
Brückmann from 1739.
It wasn't until 1794 that German anatomist
(04:22):
Johann Christian Rosenmüller became the
first to publish a description of the
creature under the name Ursus spelaeus,
or cave bear, from a skull found in
the Gaillenreuth caves in Bavaria.
Large deposits of cave bear bones are
typically found together leading to
speculation as to whether they lodged
in the caves year round, lived and
died in family groups, or simply found
(04:43):
themselves dying in the same places
over tens of thousands of years.
Rosenmüller, however, still ascribed a
certain myth of quality to the species.
He wrote (04:51):
If a hundred thousand dog
skulls found in an Egyptian cave proved
that these animals were considered
sacred, I see nothing implausible in the
idea that our bear bones were similarly
brought into the caves by human hands
and that they should be considered the
remnants or proof of a pagan reverence."
With Rosenmüller and others
like him, "dragon" fell away
(05:13):
to be replaced by "bear."
Wooly mammoths followed
a similar trajectory.
The first Mastodon bones to be discovered,
or at least the first to be subjected
to modern scientific scrutiny were
discovered along the Ohio river in 1739.
George QVA created his idea of espèces
perdues, or lost species in 1796, largely
(05:36):
as a result of decades of struggled by
the scientific community in Europe to
resolve those bones with living species.
This was the first example of
extinction as a scientific idea,
and the beginning of paleontology.
Barely a generation later, Darwin
discovered the bones of megafauna like
Macrauchenia or the so-called long
llama - look it up, it's ridiculous
(05:57):
- during the voyage of the Beagle in 1834.
Alfred Russell Wallace wrote in 1837
that " we live in a zoologically
impoverished world from which all of
the hugest and fiercest and strangest
forms of life have recently disappeared."
And this is the backdrop
against which the fantasy we're
enjoying in D and D was created.
(06:17):
HP Lovecraft's invention of cosmic horror
started with his short story "Dagon"
in 1910, when the concept of time on a
geological scale made mankind feel smaller
and more insignificant than he ever had.
J R R Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings
in 1937 in the wake of World War II,
when much of Europe had been grounded
(06:38):
to mud under tank treads and his fantasy
picture to spiraling descent to a less
awesome, less cool, less magical world.
Middle Earth, he supposed, was
our earth, but already ancient and
forgotten before the founding of Rome
and Middle Earth itself was a palid
echo of far more magical ages past.
This was a genre suffused with nostalgia
(07:01):
and starting in 1974 D and D coded the
work of these fantasy authors into its
game mechanics, filling ancient caves,
and tombs and ruins with dinosaurs,
cave, bears, dire wolves, and dragons,
the echoes of an older Wilder world.
In other words, extinction
is part of the DNA of DND.
(07:25):
And if we're living through the sixth mass
extinction as author Elizabeth Kolbert
and others have posited, then what kind
of fantasy are we setting up to tell?
Is this Middle Earth?
Are we the elves passing
away into the west?
And what kind of world
are we leaving behind?
Those are the central questions
behind Book of Extinction.
(07:53):
So thank you for listening to
Making a Monster Extinction.
All of the stories I've told are
being added to book of extinction,
which is coming to Kickstarter
in November of this year.
We're up to 65 pages and it's starting
to look like a real book now, but
if you want to get your hands on the
first three monsters, the thylacine
the great auk and the passenger pigeon,
you can get them right now by going
(08:13):
to scintilla.studio slash extinction.
That's S C I N T I L
L a.studio/extinction.
There, you can download a PDF
preview including those first three
monsters, and here's the cool part.
You can pay what you want for it,
and everything that we earn from this
preview will go to support the Center
for Biological Diversity, a legal and
(08:34):
media advocacy organization, working
on behalf of endangered species and
wild places in America and worldwide.
Extinction can be a tragic and
maudlin topic, but I believe that the
best antidote to despair is action.
And I wanted to give you a way to do that.
The conservationists and advocates at
the center are real life, solar punks,
(08:55):
and they're very inspiring to me.
And you might hear their voices on future
episodes of Making a Monster (08:58):
Extinction.
So follow this podcast wherever you
happen to be listening and do me a
favor, write and review the podcast.
If you've got a second or two.
It seems like a small thing, but it
really does help new listeners discover
the show, helps this project grow
and gives it the momentum to bring
more of these stories into your ears.
Every week.
(09:19):
If you've listened this far,
then you can hit that little
heart icon on the Spotify player.
It's a real gift to me and the
creators I do intend to feature.
I'll be back next week with
a new extinction story.
And as soon as I can, I'll be
bringing you a full episode on the
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet.
So look forward to those and
I will see you next week.
Here's your extinction story
for the week (00:01):
dragon bones piled by
the hundreds in caves all over Europe.
Hello and welcome to Making a Monster:
Extinction, the stories of extinct animals
(00:21):
retold as Dungeons and dragons monsters.
I'm Lucas Zellers I'm your host.
And I'm gathering these stories into a
bestiary called Book of Extinction coming
to Kickstarter in November of 2020.
This episode might be a little bit
different than what you're used to.
Making a Monster is the surprising
history behind monsters written for
Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop
RPGs, and Making a Monster (00:42):
Extinction
was meant to show you how I'm going
through the process of mythologizing,
extinct animals for Dungeons and Dragons.
My goal is highly-produced, highly-edited
interviews with experts on the
particular animals I'm working with.
And I still plan to do episodes like that.
I'm working on episodes for the
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet,
but if I want Book of Extinction to be
(01:04):
everything it can be, occasionally the
expert I'll be consulting is just me.
In at least the case of the Florida
fairy shrimp, Book of Extinction may
contain the largest body of extant
literature on a given species.
So I'm willing to claim that
title, at least in so far
as the podcast requires it.
And as an expert, I believe I have
a unique point to make about the
(01:25):
intersection of conservation in D
and D and digging up dragon bones.
The monster manual has a hierarchy
of bears (01:32):
black bear brown
bear, polar bear and cave bear.
The last is just the polar bear,
but with dark vision, but in
true "Making a Monster" style,
there's way more to it than that.
Over the last month I've been working
on Pleistocene megafauna, giant animals
gone extinct in the geological epic
previous to the one in which we live.
(01:52):
These are the original dire creatures
like dire wolves and yes, cave bears,
the oversized animals who lived
before the current geological era.
And at first I thought doing this
work would detract from my point,
which is the urgent and tragic
loss of a mind-boggling amount of
biodiversity within your lifetime.
(02:14):
And time does create a psychological
distance from the problem, so that the
extinction of the giant ground sloths
or wooly mammoth, it doesn't cause
nearly the level of emotional turmoil
as that of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
But I think there's another point to
be made by embracing that timescale.
We don't get good fantasy literature
without a world packed with biodiversity,
(02:36):
and I can use dragon bones to prove it.
From Cyclops to Godzilla, to
jaws, giant creatures form the
backbone of the monster ecosystem.
In fact, one of the many meanings of
the word monster is "huge" because at
a certain point, sheer size is enough
to recontextualize a human's perceived
place in the food chain from predator.
(02:56):
Or perhaps to paramecium, a creature
so comparatively small, it has beneath
the notice of the food chain entirely.
And it's no coincidence that the fiction
in Appendix N, the works that inspired
Dungeons and Dragons, was largely written
against the backdrop of the natural
history boom of the late 18 hundreds when
natural historians, fossil collectors,
(03:18):
and archeologists inspired the"gentleman
explorer" archetype that would later
be personified in Indiana Jones.
In a lot of cases, these
gentlemen explorers were looking
at the fossils of megafauna.
We've talked about Cyclops skulls in Crete
and Griffin bones in the Gobi desert.
And although I have heard of objections
to those examples, they do illustrate
(03:39):
the turn of natural history from fantasy
to fact to extinction, and dragon bones
are the fulcrum on which it happened.
In the 16 and 17 hundreds, the bones
of cave bears were discovered in
droves, in caves all over Europe.
The scientific discourse of the
day argued over whether they
belonged to apes, candids fields,
or even dragons or unicorns.
(04:01):
And as they were drawn in the historical
journals at the time, they were often
called, in all seriousness, dragon bones.
Some examples are “De draconum
Carpathicorum cavernis” by P.J.
Hain from 1672 and “Antra
draconum Liptovensis” by F.
Brückmann from 1739.
It wasn't until 1794 that German anatomist
(04:22):
Johann Christian Rosenmüller became the
first to publish a description of the
creature under the name Ursus spelaeus,
or cave bear, from a skull found in
the Gaillenreuth caves in Bavaria.
Large deposits of cave bear bones are
typically found together leading to
speculation as to whether they lodged
in the caves year round, lived and
died in family groups, or simply found
(04:43):
themselves dying in the same places
over tens of thousands of years.
Rosenmüller, however, still ascribed a
certain myth of quality to the species.
He wrote (04:51):
If a hundred thousand dog
skulls found in an Egyptian cave proved
that these animals were considered
sacred, I see nothing implausible in the
idea that our bear bones were similarly
brought into the caves by human hands
and that they should be considered the
remnants or proof of a pagan reverence."
With Rosenmüller and others
like him, "dragon" fell away
(05:13):
to be replaced by "bear."
Wooly mammoths followed
a similar trajectory.
The first Mastodon bones to be discovered,
or at least the first to be subjected
to modern scientific scrutiny were
discovered along the Ohio river in 1739.
George QVA created his idea of espèces
perdues, or lost species in 1796, largely
(05:36):
as a result of decades of struggled by
the scientific community in Europe to
resolve those bones with living species.
This was the first example of
extinction as a scientific idea,
and the beginning of paleontology.
Barely a generation later, Darwin
discovered the bones of megafauna like
Macrauchenia or the so-called long
llama - look it up, it's ridiculous
(05:57):
- during the voyage of the Beagle in 1834.
Alfred Russell Wallace wrote in 1837
that " we live in a zoologically
impoverished world from which all of
the hugest and fiercest and strangest
forms of life have recently disappeared."
And this is the backdrop
against which the fantasy we're
enjoying in D and D was created.
(06:17):
HP Lovecraft's invention of cosmic horror
started with his short story "Dagon"
in 1910, when the concept of time on a
geological scale made mankind feel smaller
and more insignificant than he ever had.
J R R Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings
in 1937 in the wake of World War II,
when much of Europe had been grounded
(06:38):
to mud under tank treads and his fantasy
picture to spiraling descent to a less
awesome, less cool, less magical world.
Middle Earth, he supposed, was
our earth, but already ancient and
forgotten before the founding of Rome
and Middle Earth itself was a palid
echo of far more magical ages past.
This was a genre suffused with nostalgia
(07:01):
and starting in 1974 D and D coded the
work of these fantasy authors into its
game mechanics, filling ancient caves,
and tombs and ruins with dinosaurs,
cave, bears, dire wolves, and dragons,
the echoes of an older Wilder world.
In other words, extinction
is part of the DNA of DND.
(07:25):
And if we're living through the sixth mass
extinction as author Elizabeth Kolbert
and others have posited, then what kind
of fantasy are we setting up to tell?
Is this Middle Earth?
Are we the elves passing
away into the west?
And what kind of world
are we leaving behind?
Those are the central questions
behind Book of Extinction.
(07:53):
So thank you for listening to
Making a Monster Extinction.
All of the stories I've told are
being added to book of extinction,
which is coming to Kickstarter
in November of this year.
We're up to 65 pages and it's starting
to look like a real book now, but
if you want to get your hands on the
first three monsters, the thylacine
the great auk and the passenger pigeon,
you can get them right now by going
(08:13):
to scintilla.studio slash extinction.
That's S C I N T I L
L a.studio/extinction.
There, you can download a PDF
preview including those first three
monsters, and here's the cool part.
You can pay what you want for it,
and everything that we earn from this
preview will go to support the Center
for Biological Diversity, a legal and
(08:34):
media advocacy organization, working
on behalf of endangered species and
wild places in America and worldwide.
Extinction can be a tragic and
maudlin topic, but I believe that the
best antidote to despair is action.
And I wanted to give you a way to do that.
The conservationists and advocates at
the center are real life, solar punks,
(08:55):
and they're very inspiring to me.
And you might hear their voices on future
episodes of Making a Monster (08:58):
Extinction.
So follow this podcast wherever you
happen to be listening and do me a
favor, write and review the podcast.
If you've got a second or two.
It seems like a small thing, but it
really does help new listeners discover
the show, helps this project grow
and gives it the momentum to bring
more of these stories into your ears.
Every week.
(09:19):
If you've listened this far,
then you can hit that little
heart icon on the Spotify player.
It's a real gift to me and the
creators I do intend to feature.
I'll be back next week with
a new extinction story.
And as soon as I can, I'll be
bringing you a full episode on the
aurochs and the Carolina parakeet.
So look forward to those and
I will see you next week.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.