Growing up in South Dakota, Adrienne Mayor was the quiet girl who never raised her hand in class. Instead, she loved to wander the prairie seeking wonders and filling her mind with stories. When she found herself in Athens, Greece, she plunged into reading the original versions of ancient myths—especially descriptions of the fabled griffin. As she read, an exciting idea took shape in her mind. Scholars had long treated accounts of the griffin as made-up fantasies. But to Mayor, they seemed to describe something ancient people had actually seen. What could that have been? Mayor's quest to solve that mystery led her from books to ruined temples, from museums to the graves of great tattooed warriors. Finally, after poring over formerly top secret maps, she located the forbidding desert where nomadic gold hunters once entered the lair of the griffin—and she came face-to-face with her quarry. Here is the story of Mayor's detective work, which has helped create a new science in which experts match myths and fossils and begin to see the world through our ancestors' eyes.