Bury Your Head in the Sand

The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described ostriches hiding their heads in bushes when threatened, apparently believing that if they couldn't see danger, it couldn't see them, in his Natural History around 77 AD. Over the following centuries, this evolved into the more dramatic popular image of an ostrich burying its entire head underground. Real ostriches do neither: they lower their heads to the ground mainly to turn the eggs in their nest, which from a distance can look something like head-burying, but they never actually bury their heads at all. Despite being demonstrably false, the image proved too good a metaphor for human denial to give up.