The Mandalorian: was the mythosaur ever extinct?

The Mandalorian season 3 went Jurassic by bringing back the mythosaur. This is the creature whose skull adorns the armor and covert symbols of the surviving Mandalorians. It was thought to have been extinct for thousands of years, but in Chapter 18 it turned out to be alive, living in the Living Waters beneath the mines of Mandalore. That ending raises many questions about the history and biology of Mandalore, so I want to lay out everything we know about the planet and its creature.

The Mandalorian is the Star Wars series starring Pedro Pascal. My own theory is that the bombing of Mandalore may be what allowed the mythosaur to return. I'll explain why in the final sections.

Mandalore's history with the Jedi and the Mandalorian cataclysm

Mandalore is a setting we've visited often in Star Wars canon, especially in the animated series The Clone Wars and Rebels. There we see the Mandalorians living in domed cities like Sundari, which protect them from the scorched terrain of the planet.

That scorching was caused by the Mandalorian cataclysm. It came at the end of the final war between the Mandalorians and the Jedi. Historically these two groups have hated each other. The Armorer referred to these wars in season 1, Chapter 8, telling of ancient battles between Mandalore the Great and an order of sorcerers called Jedi. In other words, she's calling them all witches.

Mandalore the First in Legends and the Darksaber in canon

In Star Wars Legends continuity, there was a figure named Mandalore the First. He led a group of fellow Taungs from Coruscant and settled on the planet Roon. They later moved on to a jungle planet that would become known as Mandalore. This would have been sometime around 7000 BBY. Mandalore the First was the first person to use the title of Mandalore.

Again, that's Legends, and it isn't necessarily considered canon, even though elements of it have been brought back into canon in recent years. In canonical titles like The Clone Wars, Rebels, The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, the ancient history of the Mandalorian people has been implied to be much earlier.

Rebels, for example, established the history of the Darksaber as more than a thousand years old. In the days of the Old Republic, Tarre Vizsla, a Force sensitive human, became the first Mandalorian to join the Jedi Order, and he forged the Darksaber. After he died, it was kept in the Jedi Temple. Members of House Vizsla broke into the temple and stole it back, then used it to rule over Mandalore for many years. The Old Republic then fell in 1032 BBY. But Mandalore the Great, it sounds like, predates all of that history.

The plaque Bo-Katan reads at the Living Waters

The plaque Bo-Katan reads by the Living Waters says the mines date back to the age of the first Mandalore. According to ancient folklore, the mines were once a mythosaur lair. Mandalore the Great is said to have subdued the mythical beast. It was from these legends that the skull signet was adopted and became the symbol of the planet.

We also know from the Ugnaught Kuiil, back in Chapter 1, that the ancient Mandalorians tamed and rode the mythosaur. Kuiil tells the Mandalorian that his ancestors rode the great mythosaur, so surely he can ride the young beast in front of him. That line was in the very first episode of the series. From that moment, the show was calling its shot about where this is all headed: "one of these Mandalorians is gonna ride this thing."

Why the mythosaur was believed to be extinct

Mandalore has gone through several waves of environmental and ecological devastation. According to Star Wars Build the Millennium Falcon magazine number 32, in its Guide to the Galaxy entry on the history of Mandalore, the mythosaurs were believed to have been extinct. In Legends, they were hunted into extinction by Mandalore the First around 7000 BBY.

Either way, they were supposedly long gone by the time of the Mandalorian cataclysm, when the war against the Jedi scorched the planet into sand. Now we know that extinction did not happen. At least one mythosaur remained active in the Living Waters.

Presumably the mythosaur's survival remained a secret. Bo-Katan didn't know about it, and it never came up among the members of the Watch. The Watch arose as a cult on the moon of Concordia, away from the surface of Mandalore, after House Vizsla was banished there for losing an uprising to the forces led by Bo-Katan's father.

The Night of a Thousand Tears and the ruins of Mandalore

Mandalore continued to look like a barren planet with domed cities throughout the Clone Wars and most of the Galactic Civil War. When we saw it in Rebels, it had not yet been bombed. But The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett established another wave of destruction, called the Purge or the Night of a Thousand Tears.

Imperial bombers led by Moff Gideon hit the planet and its cities with fusion bombs, going through the ashes to steal any beskar they could find. That left Mandalore the wasteland it is now, its sands melted into green glass and its cities abandoned and covered in debris.

As the ruins are explored, Din is surprised to discover that the air is breathable and conditions aren't toxic. Fauna has survived too, including Alamites and reptilian bats. That suggests a food chain that could allow for an apex predator, and sure enough, a mythosaur the size of a city is living in the Living Waters.

Is the mythosaur a kaiju or a gentle giant?

This mythosaur is aquatic or amphibious, like the kaiju of other fiction. Godzilla, for example, is a Titan that in Toho's mythology was awakened or activated by human nuclear testing in the Pacific. It remains to be seen whether this creature will be a force of destruction or a gentle giant. I'm assuming the latter, especially since Grogu has proven, with that Rancor, his ability to tame large, ferocious beasts.

According to the plaque, the Living Waters were known to be a mythosaur lair in ancient times. That makes it a kind of prehistoric fossil site, like the La Brea Tar Pits. That's how Bo-Katan reads it. To her, this was a sacred site she grew up with, and she never thought there was anything magical or special about it. So for an actual living dinosaur to be beneath the surface of her old field trip destination must be terrifying to her. Bo-Katan and the millions of people living in Sundari never had any reason to believe a kaiju was beneath their feet.

My theory: the fusion bombs let the mythosaur return

I'm willing to guess that it was the fusion bombs of the Night of a Thousand Tears that brought back the mythosaur. Not necessarily by irradiating it into giant size, the way it works with Godzilla, but perhaps simply by clearing industrialized life off the planet for the first time in thousands of years. That would have wiped out all the noisy activity from the beskar mines, rebalanced the ecosystem and allowed the mythosaur to grow to its full adult size.

So the mythosaurs weren't hunted to extinction. They receded to the waterways beneath the planet's surface and went dormant. Like the dragons of House Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire, their disappearance coincided with the fall of a great house, and they lived on only in banners, legends and other iconography.

Based on its size now, there's no way this mythosaur could crawl out of the mines to the surface. There must be another back door, a network of waterways it uses to navigate, like the Naboo waterways occupied by the Sando Aqua Monster. There's no way it could grow this big without room to swim. And there may also be others.

Why the mythosaur matters more than the Darksaber

From a thematic standpoint, the return of the mythosaur represents a critical restoration of faith for Bo-Katan and for the members of the Watch. Until now they've been feuding over the Darksaber. The Darksaber was meant to replace the mythosaur as a unifying symbol for the Mandalorian people, but it never did that.

Relatively speaking, the Darksaber is a more recent historical artifact, and in practice it has only ever divided Mandalorians from each other. It requires them to fight each other. The Darksaber is their curse. But the mythosaur, a symbol far older than the Darksaber and more purely Mandalorian, with no sorcerer stink on it, is their redeemer.