This caused a great deal of controversy between "those in the know" at that time and generated a pile of treatises, for and against, gigantology. It was also a good time for opportunists: a surgeon barber obtained a few bones belonging to some unknown creature from the Marquis who owned the site and took them around villages and towns proclaiming that they belonged to Theutobochus, a Germanic leader who, in Roman times, had devastated large parts of Gaul and Iberia.