A thing I love about Mythic Europe is the “It works the way people believed that it worked, not as we know it.” Thus, there’s a lot of things that go differently - medicine, gravity, planets. What I’m curious about though is…dinosaurs. That seems to exist in the fuzzy area where, historically, people discovered fossils here and there, though they usually attributed them to giants, dragons, other mythical figures (and apparently St. George?). AFAIK there weren’t any even moderately complete skeletons found by 1220, there’s no Carolingian Sue, for example. BUT, people did occasionally find fossilized bones. So.
Are they technically physically down there, or does the fact that they aren’t within the medieval paradigm mean that if you dug somewhere that we now know has a Titanosaur fossil would be simply rock all the way down?
Is it within the capacity of Hermetic magic to discover them, and theoretically bring dinosaurs back? (eg, an Intellego Animal spell cast on a dinosaur bone to see the whole of the beast, and then a Creo Ritual to make one)
Would the fossilization of the bones create problems for which Form (Animal or Terram) it would apply to?
Would the general belief that these are the bones of mythic figures/creatures mean that, even if a Hermetic magus DID discover them, an Intellego spell would declare them the bones of a magic-realm sea serpent (for instance)?
If a Mage existed in a version of Mythic Europe with a fairly permissive Storyguide, how would you use your knowledge of dinosaurs for fun and profit?
Dinosaur bones were discovered centuries before the medieval period. They just were not considered dinosaur bones- they might belong to giants, or dragons, or any other number of mythic creatures. People didn’t piece them together or if they did there was certainly not any scientific rigor to the way in which they did it.
I believe I wrote a thing so bad about this that Sheila Thomas wrote a magazine article to correct the record. Her article is in Hermes Portal issue 2, here: Wayback Machine
More of an SG question even in a fairly 'default' interpretation of the setting: does your SG want to do something with the knowledge that there are fossils in the area? If so there might be bones of mythical creatures down there.
Possibly. There exists the spell The Whole from the Part (HoH: TL pg. 72), which can show you a person's body based on their corpse, but it requires a current Arcane Connection.
It might affect the Form of the Intellego spell you'd use to gain that understanding, but not the Creo spell to recreate the dinosaur.
Not by default, Intellego isn't really affected by popular belief that way. The "Fact vs Theory" on A&A pg. 20 actually establishes that Hermetic Magic used to produce anomalous results that were later explained by the "modern" (13th century) understanding. That said, in a variant setting where dinosaurs used to exist and Mythic Europe's paradigm is incorrect, that might not be the case.
In terms of mythic paradigm they are likely not dinosaur bones, but if you think about the things that, mythically speaking, could be extinct they could be much, much worse. Titans who didn’t survive the Titanomachy come to mind…
IMO, this fits cleanly within Mythic Europe’s “Medieval Paradigm.” These were a known phenomenon – albeit a tad esoteric – and thus they were as they were believed/explained to be: bones of dragons, and etc.
There were no “dinosaurs,” nor multimillions of years of prehistoric evolution to T.rex and similar apex predators.