The griffin, with the hindquarters of a lion and the head, wings and talons of an eagle, is usually filed alongside the Minotaur and Medusa as a Greek monster. This episode traces the creature back much further: to a slate cosmetic palette from Hierakonpolis in Egypt dating before 3000 BC and a fourth-millennium BC cylinder seal from Susa showing a winged, beaked lion with its mane still attached. Egyptian, Persian and Greek names for the beast reveal what each culture projected onto it, from ‘the terror’ to a literal ‘lion eagle’, and why fusing the ruler of the sky with the ruler of the earth made such effective political branding.

From there the story follows the griffin into Greek lore through the traveler Aristeas and the Scythian gold fields guarded against one-eyed Arimaspian horsemen, into medieval theology as a symbol of Christ’s dual nature, and into a relic trade that sold ibex horns as griffin claws and ostrich eggs as griffin eggs. The conversation also covers heraldry’s oddball variants like the keythong and sea-griffin, the 11th-century Pisa Griffin bronze, and the debate between folklorist Adrienne Mayor and paleontologist Mark Witton over whether Protoceratops fossils inspired the legend.

• Why Greek bronze cauldron protomes gave griffins warts, top-knots and screaming open beaks
• How medieval scholars explained griffin eggs with ‘eagle stones’ and lapidary science
• Heraldic workarounds: the wingless spiked keythong, the fish-tailed sea-griffin, and the camel-tailed opinicus
• The chronological problem that Near Eastern art poses for the dinosaur-fossil theory
• Where the griffin survives today, from Purdue and Vauxhall to the old Iran Air logo