Teutobod

The supposed migrations of the Teutons and the Cimbri. Cimbri and Teutons defeats. Cimbri and Teutons victories.

Teutobod was a king of the Teutons, who, together with the allied Cimbri, invaded the Roman Republic in the Cimbrian War and won a spectacular victory at the Battle of Arausio in 105 BC. He was later defeated and captured at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC by the Roman army led by Gaius Marius. In legend, he was known as Teutobochus or Theutobochus, but were later shown to belong to the extinct elephant-relative Deinotherium.

Teutobochus tomb hoax In 1613, a gravestone engraved with the name "Theutobochus Rex" was reputedly excavated from a sand pit in the vicinity of Langon, near Montrigaud in southeast France, also reputedly alongside enormous bones, and silver coins depicting Gaius Marius. By the 17th century popular accounts of Teutobod considered him to be a giant. A French surgeon named Mazurier exhibited these relics across France, and for some time they were located in apartments owned by Queen of France Marie de' Medici. However, the veracity of the story was quickly questioned and subject to much controversy, with a long-running dispute via an exchange of pamphlets between the University of Paris surgeon Nicholas Habicot, who argued for a giant identity, and botany student and anatomist Jean Riolan who argued based on comparative anatomy that the bones represented some kind of large animal (in Riolan's opinion likely an elephant), and that the supposed discovery was either mistaken or a fraud.

21 years later in 1634, French polymath Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc asked the physician Nivolet to investigate the site and the relics (except the tombstone, which was now missing). Following the details of a report that Nivolet sent to him Peiresc concluded that the story was a hoax (based on the fact that the coins were actually from Massalia and did not depict Marius, and that it was unlikely a Germanic leader would have a gravestone written in Latin which he and his people did not speak) and later after another discovery of another supposed giant within the vicinity of Montrigaud, like Riolan concluded the remains represented those of an elephant. and were centuries later recognised as belonging to Deinotherium, an extinct relative of modern elephants.