On the 556th evening of successfully not being murdered by her chucklehead king of a husband in the Arabian Nights, Scheherazade relates the tale of Sinbad’s tanglings with a beast most cruel. Sailing from city to city with merchants, Sinbad eventually comes to a deserted island, where he spies a huge white dome half buried in the beach. His shipmates leave him behind and venture to shore, where they discover that the dome is not a dome at all, but the outsized egg of the rukh, a bird of enormous proportions.

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Naturally, Sinbad’s shipmates split the egg open and slaughter the huge chick within. Upon seeing this Sinbad shouts, “Stop, stop! Do not meddle with that egg, or the bird Rukh will come out and break our ship and destroy us.” Now enter papa and mama rukh—none too pleased, mind you—who chase the men back onto the ship. Then, grabbing boulders with their formidable talons, they proceed to drop them on the boat, blasting it to pieces.

Sinbad survives, but this isn’t actually his first encounter with the rukh: Deserted on another island, he’d once escaped by strapping himself to the beast’s leg with his turban. Nor was Sinbad the only man to tell such tales. The legend of the rukh, it turns out, has not just a deep history, but perhaps even psychological roots dating back millions of years.

This legend began in the Arab world, yet long before the Arabian Nights were translated into English, Marco Polo himself once described the rukh, according to Matt Kaplan in his book Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters. Its wings, the great explorer wrote, “covered an extent of 30 paces, and its quills were 12 paces long, and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him the bird gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure.” He clarifies that the local people call it “ruc,” and that it is certainly not the half lion and half eagle griffin “as our stories do relate, but enormous as they be they are fashioned just like an eagle.”

With such ridiculous size, one would wonder how exactly two could fit in Noah’s ark (to say nothing of the other 9 million species on Earth, but whatever). The problem apparently didn’t cross the mind of Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton, who later welcomed aboard “All feathered things yet ever knowne to men / From the huge Rucke, unto the little Wren.” And God forbid they’d be seated anywhere near the elephants.

So, exactly what size would the rukh have needed to be to make off with elephants? Luckily, Kaplan worked out the exact physics, which he calls “a chore.” Given that eagles can lift half their body weight, a rukh would need to be 2,000 pounds to lift a 1,000-pound elephant, he claims. After some complicated math that I don’t quite grasp because I dropped out of physics in high school, the rukh would need to have a wing area of 800 square feet, making the wingspan 164 feet. Which is a fancy numerical way of saying it isn’t possible to have a bird anywhere near the size of the rukh take flight. There’s no way it could muster the requisite strength or keep its bones from buckling.

Which is not to say that a few real-life flying critters haven’t pushed the laws of physics here. Quetzalcoatlus northropi (above), an enormous pterosaur of the Cretaceous period and the subject of an awesome NSFW rap, had a wingspan of 33 feet and stood as tall as a giraffe, and probably hunted by ambling on the ground scooping up baby dinosaurs. And there was Argentavis magnificens, which lived just 6 million years ago, a sort of giant vulture with a wingspan of 23 feet.

With both of these impressive beasts, there would have been no real maneuverability to speak of, unlike modern eagles and hawks. They were simply too big to be spry. Even keeping such heft aloft would have been a tall order, so Quetz and Argentavis likely exploited rising columns of hot air called thermals. Indeed, paleontologist Mark Witton claims Quetz would have thus been able to hit speeds of 80 MPH and stay aloft for a week at a time.

It wasn’t these fliers, though, that inspired the legend of the rukh. Even if ancient Arab peoples could have somehow pieced together the fragmentary fossils of either, both species actually lived in the Western Hemisphere. (Incidentally, though, it could well be that the legend of the griffin was inspired by our ancestors finding fossilized specimens of Protoceratops, which had beaks resembling those of eagles.) Nor, as Kaplan rightly points out, could the inspiration have been the elephant bird of Madagascar, as Richard Dawkins has suggested. While the bird didn’t go extinct until 1030, Europeans and Arabs didn’t even get to the island until the 16th century.

There is, though, an extant eagle in Africa, Asia, and Europe called the bearded vulture, or lammergeier, which behaves much like the rukh, Kaplan notes. It’s a scavenger, but not a big enough scavenger to swallow a bone whole. So it picks one up, climbs and climbs, then drops the bone on rocks, shattering it into bite-sized bits. The rukh theoretically doing the same thing with an elephant would have been just as effective, if not a bit messier, of course.

So while we may not have a real beast to stand as the inspiration for the rukh, we may well have at least a psychological one. For Kaplan, it was typical scare-mongering. At sea, sailors would have no need to fear the enormous Calydonian boar or Nemean lion, but the rukh could reach them anywhere. And that could well be true, but I’d also propose a more ancient psychological rooting here.

You see, in our not too distant evolutionary past, early humans were hunted by eagles. We know this from a remarkable Australopithecus africanus specimen called the Taung Child, which palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger discovered had the same skull damage as modern monkeys killed by eagles.

He says in a fascinating interview with Radiolab: “Have you ever thought why when you’re standing out on a playground or standing out in an open field, and a shadow passes over you, do you know that feeling that occurred, whether it be from an airplane or whatever? First you get that tingly feel on the back of your neck, and then you yank your head up. You ever wondered why you do that? You do that because the little Taung Child died two and a half million years ago because he didn’t look up quick enough when that happened.”

Could the hyperbolic upscaling of the rukh be a manifestation of this fear? After all, on the other side of the world, the Maori have their own similarly cranky gigantic eagle, the Hakawai. But then again, the Garuda of Hindu mythology looks much the same, but is perfectly pleasant. Kaplan notes, though, that the benevolent Garuda may have arisen from the gratitude the peoples of the Indian subcontinent felt for eagles that hunted poisonous snakes.

So while we have no clear answers here, it’s important to appreciate what such mythology says about us as humans. Be careful how you treat us, we seem to say, or we’ll write stories about you being mean to Sinbad. And we love Sinbad.

Reference:

Kaplan, M. (2012) Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters. Scribner