From a previous EarthDate, you may remember that some mythological creatures were born when ancient cultures discovered fossils and created stories to explain them.

Well, here’s a famous beast that started as a tiny elephant.

During the Pleistocene ice ages, polar ice and continental glaciers held more of Earth’s water, causing sea level to fall.

During low sea-level periods, elephants from Africa walked and swam across a nearly dry Mediterranean to Europe. Once seas rose again, some were trapped on islands like Sicily.

When a population gets stuck on an island, it will often overstress its food reserves and be forced to adapt—something called island rule.

These elephants shrunk to survive on less food, and on Sicily got as small as 3 ft tall and 250 pounds.

Once adapted, they did quite well, with no natural predators…

That is, until man arrived, 11,000 years ago. Overstressing their own food reserves, early tribes hunted the small elephants to extinction.

Some of their bones ended up in caves, where tribes lived or cooked. And thousands of years later, the Greeks discovered them.

The elephants’ skulls were about twice the size of a human’s—with a single hole in the middle where the trunk would have been.

Having never seen an elephant, the Greeks imagined these were the skulls of giants with one large eye: the dreaded cave-dwelling Cyclopes—which then appeared in Greek mythology and rose to fame in Homer’s Odyssey.