This is nifty stuff.
It's also interesting to think how you can link prehistoric and ancient creatures to early religions and mythology, which after Christianity took over, were turned into a pantheon of Demons.
That didn't begin with Christianity, Judaistic tradition tread that ground far before Christ. Cabbalism is hardly new, and hardly scriptural.
Most parables were designed to teach morality, though ancient peoples probably invented monsters for the same reasons they do now: entertainment, warnings, convent explanations for events outside of their control, genuine fear or belief, etc...
Listen to the Snake Lady, monsters are hardly an invention. A couple years back they found the
finger bones of a child in the fossilized remains of giant bird shit, dating back some 120,000 years. It is fairly well established that burial practices were conducted by our ancestors of that era, so its not simply plausible but pretty fucking likely giant winged things would knab errant kids without a second thought if they strayed too far from their parents. In South American they found the skeletal remains of a young girl, 16, dated around 10,000 years ago toward the end of the ice age at the bottom of what is now an underwater cave with very low oxygen levels resulting in immaculate conditions for preservation. Her bones suggested that her musculature was equivalent to that of a professional male athlete of around 30 and that she'd also survived more that one child birth as well as numerous healed breaks and fractures. Also around her remains were those of dozens of other animals who had fallen to the same sort of death, the overwhelming majority of which were predatory species.
That is the the world we clawed our way out of.
