Re: historical origins of BCF

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>  Yes, like ancient Greeks thought that mammoth skulls were cyclops
skulls.>>
>
> Well, no Greek ever saw a cyclops, but we have all seen birds. The Greeks
> >did< recognize that mammoths were unlike anything else they had ever seen
> and acted appropriately within their cultural milieu. If the term
"mammoth"
> weren't so entrenched, one could actually make a case for renaming
mammoths
> "cyclopes."

Not mammoths!!!
The dwarf elephants of various Mediterranean islands, *Elephas falconeri*
and suchlike.

> << > So in 1802 dinosaurs were thought to be giant
>  > birds. (Sometime before that, they were thought to be giant people.)
They
>  > weren't known as dinosaurs until 1842.
>
>  In 1802 they weren't talking about dinosaurs, they were talking about
"bird"
>  footprints.  The idea that they weren't birds didn't occur to them.>>
>
> Good thing, too. Because, you see, dinosaurs >are< birds. They got that
part
> right.

They would have if someone had looked at Owen's dinosaurs and declared
"these are the birds that produced those tracks". Nothing of the sort
happened, to Owen Dinosauria was a suborder of lizards.