 Despite its poor resemblance of the skull in question, the Lindwurm statue was thought to be almost certainly inspired by the find.The German textbook "Mundus Subterraneus", authored by scholar Athanasius Kircher in 1678, features a number of illustrations of giant humans and dragons that may have been informed by fossil finds of the day, many of which came from quarries and caves.Some of these may have been the bones of large Pleistocene mammals common to these European caves.