Scientist: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
Sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Paré wrote several books about monsters ("things that appear outside the course of Nature") and marvels ("things which happen that are completely against Nature"). Paré was known to be a compassionate and talented doctor, and some of his depictions were remarkably accurate. Others were less credible.
Scientist: Guillaume Rondelet
Originally published in: Libri de Piscibus Merinis
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister, and "The Origin of the Sea Bishop" by W.M.S. Russell and F.S. Russell in Folklore, Summer 1975 issue
Rondelet based his sea bishop depiction on an account he received from a physician, Gisbertus Germanus, who saw the creature in Poland. Rondelet was skeptical, and stated that he had omitted from his description several "fabulous" claims about the sea bishop. "I present the image of the monster altogether the way I received it," he continued. "Whether it is true or not, I neither affirm nor deny." The fish, which might have been based on a doctored skate or ray, made an appearance later in the 16th century in Ambroise Paré's Des Monstres, complete with its pontifical garments. It is not known whether Paré himself was a devout Catholic, but a few months before his death, he was reputed to confront the Archbishop of Lyons on behalf of the poor and starving in Paris. Religious animosities ran high during Paré's lifetime and for centuries afterwards, so it's no coincidence that some monsters bore striking resemblances to clergymen. Periods of religious strife likely increased attention to so-called monsters and certainly changed the explanations offered for them, from sins such as greed and vanity to sins of blasphemy and heresy.
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Printer: Richard Breton
Originally published in: : Le Recueil de la Diversité des Habits
Now appears in: "Habits, Holdings, Heterologies: Populations in Print in a 1562 Costume Book" by Ann Rosalind Jones in Yale French Studies
Rondelet's sea bishop found its way into other publications more or less intact, but in the early 1560s, a French printer named Richard Breton tweaked the picture to make it creepier. His sea bishop appeared in a book about the clothing styles of locals and foreigners. The book wasn't really about fashion; it was a substitute for travel to faraway places — understandable considering travel experiences in the 16th century ranged from unpleasant to deadly. As Renaissance and Enlightenment naturalists discovered more exotic animals, they sometimes used familiar analogies to describe what they found, and Rondelet's depiction may (or may not) have belonged to that tradition. At the same time, many Catholics and Protestants utterly despised each other, and clerical-looking monsters were a way of criticizing the followers of the wrong religion. Fervent Protestant Breton made the sea bishop not only uglier than Rondelet's, he also took care to give it more elegant attire (note the embroidery on the creature's upper cape). Did Breton mean for anyone to take this literally? It may have been simple satire, although frightening "prodigies" like this were publicized by Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon to warn Catholics that they followed awful leaders.
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Originally published in: "A Lamentable List of Certaine Hidious, Frightfull, and Prodigious Signs"
Now appears in: "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England" by Park and Daston in Past and Present, August 1981 issue
In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, monsters were rarely viewed in a void, especially when they were considered bad omens. In those times, they were regarded parts of multi-pronged warnings: earthquakes, floods, falling stars. This "lamentable list" shows conjoined twins, a creature with a face on his torso, and what looks like the head of a monarch on the body of a worm, in addition to other disturbing signs. The picture also apparently includes the unfortunate events the bad omens foretell, such as armed conflict. The religious animosities of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation fueled rumors of impossible creatures, as well as fearful interpretations of any kind of birth defect. The invention of the printing press only eased the spread of such scary propaganda. Broadsides — posters that could also be read aloud to the illiterate by hawkers and sold to the literate for about a penny apiece — tended to engage in the most dire interpretations of monstrous apparitions. In fact, religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and among different Protestant sects may have sparked even more interest in monsters than had occurred during the Middle Ages. Highbrow and lowbrow alike took an interest. As religious tensions gradually eased, so did the assumption that any unusual event or deformity necessarily foretold divine wrath.
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Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Historia Animalium
Now appears in: Cultures of Natural History edited by Jardine, Secord and Spary
Today, the term "ichneumon" typically refers to a wasp or, even more exotically, an Egyptian mongoose. To medieval Europeans, however, the ichneumon was the dragon's worst enemy, using a combination of camouflage and cunning to kill that scaly, winged beast. Given mongooses' adversarial relationships with snakes, the ichneumon's story might have had some basis in reality. This picture, however, looks a bit like a porcupine.
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Scientist/artist: Pierre Boaistuau
Originally published in: Histoires Prodigieuses
Now appears in: Wonders and the Order of Nature by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
Within a few decades of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses a new monster made an appearance in Europe. Called the Monster of Krakow (or Cracow), this beast sported heads on its joints — the standard identifier of demonic handiwork. It reputedly died four hours after its birth, but not without warning, "Watch, the Lord cometh." By the time this monster was "born," Luther and Philipp Melanchthon had published pamphlets about other monsters engendered by divine displeasure with the papacy. Convictions that heretical beliefs were on the rise likely played a role in the appearance of this beast.
Scientist/artist: Athanasius Kircher
Originally published in: Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
Now appears in: "Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture" by Paula Findlen in Configurations, Spring 1998
One way to make nature less frightening was to give it a sense of humor. Well-known for his own sense of humor (he liked to dress up cats in little outfits), Kircher was well-suited to this task. His examples of nature's jokes included rocks showing pictures and plants sporting little men. In the end, playfulness like Kircher's didn't prevail, and scientists like Francis Bacon and Robert Hooke stressed the seriousness of scientific pursuits. Good humor was reserved for "vulgar" works directed at the uneducated masses, women and children.
Scientist: Simon Conway Morris
Artist: Marianne Collins
Appears in: Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. Also discussed in The Crucible of Creation by Simon Conway Morris
If you're thinking this is the worst fabrication in history, think again. In fact, this depiction isn't far from the real thing. In 1909, C.D. Walcott discovered a remarkable fossil locality known as the Burgess Shale, preserving some of the strangest fossils ever found. Paleontologists began reexamining Burgess Shale fossils in the latter half of the 20th century, and identified, among others, Hallucigenia shown here. Simon Conway Morris, who identified Hallucigenia, originally theorized that it might have walked on its seven pairs of spines. Later finds, and studies done by Hou Xianguang and Lars Ramsköld, showed that Hallucigenia actually had seven pairs of big tentacles (not the single set shown here) and probably walked on those while defending itself with menacing spines. In all fairness, Conway Morris's interpretation was based on incomplete data, and he himself pointed out the correction in The Crucible of Creation.
Scientist: J. Sluperius
Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Believe it or not, the animal that inspired this hideous depiction is a gentle vegetarian: the elephant. This 16th-century engraving of a cyclops kept alive a myth that started thousands of years before, when ancient Greeks assumed the big skulls they found must have belong to giants, and the median nasal openings must have been single eye sockets.
Originally published in: Peterborough Bestiary
Now appears in: The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson
Another real animal sometimes described as monstrous was the vulture, shown here finishing off a human corpse. The bestiary that pictured this bird not only described its alleged ability to spot corpses at a great distance, but also its ability to produce young without a mate. This curious "fact" was enlisted as evidence for the immaculate conception. Vultures were also believed to foretell death. Some said the birds followed doomed armies in search of future meals.
Scientist: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
Paré described this simply as "a very monstrous animal that is born in Africa." A similar picture appeared in an earlier book by Gesner, and that creature was described as a sea monster found somewhere between Antibes and Nice.
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: Monstrorum Historia
Now appears in: "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters" by Rudolf Wittkower in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1942
The crane-man, basically a man with a long neck and crane's head, appeared in pamphlets aimed at Europe's most gullible. (Then as now, publishers could make a tidy profit by promoting the macabre.) Depictions of the crane-man eventually found their way into the occasionally weird works of Aldrovandi, this work published after his death. The crane-man underwent a number of transformations in Europe, from a member of a monstrous race to a one-off monster from Madagascar, to a long-necked yet human-headed tartar. Crane-man pictures circulated through Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England.
Scientist: William Buckland
Artist: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
Originally published in: "Bridgewater Treatise" in Geology and Minerology
Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick
This scene from Liassic life (during the Age of Reptiles) shows how 19th-century scientists and artists saw contemporaries of dinosaurs. These dragon-like creatures were marine reptiles.
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus
Now appears in: The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis
Magnus described the Soe Orm as, "A very large Sea-Serpent of a length upwards of 200 feet and 20 feet in diameter which lives in rocks and in holes near the shore of Bergen."
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Historia Animalium
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
Described as the "Arabian or Egyptian crocodile," this beast might have been inspired by the sighting of a spiny-tailed lizard.
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: The History of Serpents and Dragons
Now appears in: Crossing Over by Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell
Despite the title of the publication in which they appeared, these creatures were actually believed to inhabit the human body.
Scientist/artist: Johannes Faber
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg and Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos
Although it stretched the limits of credulity, Faber included this depiction of a two-headed animal, the amphisbaena, in the Thesaurus, recounting, "Just as I became convinced that the two-headed amphisbaena was probably the stuff of myth and fable rather than of truth, the Cavaliere Cassiano dal Pozzo, one of our Linceans, showed me the most truthful image of an amphisbaena in the form of a drawing with all the appropriate colors." The amphisbaena dated back to medieval bestiaries, but the 17th-century Lincean Academy, of which Faber was a member, was generally known for more accurate depictions.
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Scientist/artist: Athanasius Kircher
Originally published in: Mundus Subterraneus
Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy and Athanasius Kircher by Joscelyn Godwin
People found gigantic fossil bones long before they could determine with much accuracy what those bones had been. The obvious — and original — diagnosis was that the big bones had belonged to giants. Remains of the biggest fellow shown here were allegedly found in a cave in 1401 and originally described by Giovanni Boccaccio. In Mundus Subterraneus, Kircher wrote of the giant, "Standing he would have been 200 cubits high, but alas, his corpse fell to dust at a touch and only a few monstrous teeth remained to be piously preserved in a nearby church." Kircher was said to dispute Boccaccio's gigantic claims, however, at the very least reducing his giant's height to a mere 30 feet. In the image, the itty-bitty creature next to the giant's left ankle is a regular-sized man; the second-littlest is Goliath.
Scientist/artist: Robert Plot
Originally published in: The Natural History of Oxfordshire
Now appears in: The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White
This bone may not look monstrous, but it was attributed to a monster. Robert Plot accurately identified this is the distal end of a femur (the end of the femur that points toward the foot). At first he guessed it might belong to an elephant, but after considering how unlikely it was for elephants to ever have been in England, he guessed that it belonged to a giant.
Artist: Erhard Reuwich
Originally published in: Perigrinationes ad Terram Sanctam
Now appears in: The Lore of the Unicorn by Odell Shepard
Reuwich included this animal, perhaps a crocodile, along with other beasts "truthfully depicted as we saw them in the Holy Land." A medieval bestiary described the "Crocodryllus" as a 30-foot-long Nile-dwelling creature armed with "horrible teeth and claws." The bestiary continued, "Hypocritical, dissolute and avaricious people have the same nature as this brute — also any people who are puffed up with the vice of pride, dirtied with the corruption of luxury, or haunted with the disease of avarice . . ."
Scientist/artist: Georg Wedel
Originally published in: Ephemerides
Now appears in: The Feejee Mermaid by Jan Bondeson
Believed to kill merely with a glance, the basilisk was sometimes described as resembling a small snake, but more often as a two-legged, winged creature. Naturally, it had an unusual mode of generation: the basilisk would spring from an egg that had been laid by an old cock and hatched by a toad — all of this carried out in a dunghill. While the basilisk was mythical, some notions leading to its image weren't entirely delusional. Old hens, still capable of laying eggs, could occasionally take on the outward appearance of roosters. And parasitic worms that found their way into eggs may have caused unappetizing basilisk baby "sightings" at breakfast.
Scientist/artist: Athanasius Kircher
Originally published in: Mundus Subterraneus
Now appears in: Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin
Kircher included in his expansive work on the subterranean world this chimerical creature. Based on an earlier depiction in one of Ulisse Aldrovandi's books, the animal shown in Kircher's book shows something that looks suspiciously like a basilisk, but the animal was said to be merely a deformed rooster residing in the Boboli Gardens of Florence. The serpentine tail suggests artistic enhancement.
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Scientist/artist: Henri Abraham Chatelain
Originally published in: Decorative Images of People and Animals, with a Map of Southern Africa
This picture shows a "Petit Lezard du Cap de Bonne Esperance" from southern Africa. Apparently a very devout lizard, it carried three crosses on its back.
Scientist/artist: Conrad Lycosthenes
Originally published in: Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon
Now appears in: "Foils and Fakes" by Suzanne Magnanini in Marvels & Tales Magazine
Midway through the 16th century, Lycosthenes published what he believed to be a comprehensive catalog of portents dating back to when God made the world. According to Lycosthenes, the ominous hydra made its appearance in 1530. The Reformation had begun, and the religious turmoil that took hold of Europe might have had something to do with its new glut of monsters. About the time this was published, however, some naturalists eyed the multi-headed creature with skepticism.
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner and "Ancient Scientific Basis of the 'Great Serpent' from Historical Evidence" by Richard B. Stothers in Isis June 2004 issue
This illustration, published in London by Edward Topsell long after Gesner's death, shows a boa eating a child. Although it looks completely fanciful, the animal might have had some basis in actual observations extending back to Antiquity. In 256 BC, Roman soldiers deployed to northern Africa reputedly watched in horror as "a reptile of astonishing size devoured many of the soldiers as they went down to the river to get water." Lacking visible feet, the reptile apparently "walked" with its ribs, and nothing the soldiers threw at the beast deterred it until they hurled a large stone at its spine. Large snakes have been known to swallow humans, and Stothers has hypothesized that some snakes might have been somewhat larger and ranged farther in centuries past than they do now. Rumored lengths of 90 feet, however, prompted him to observe, "Antiquity doubtless had its P.T. Barnums, too."
