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: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
This "marine monster" was described by Paré as resembling a Bishop dressed in 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. (Paré probably didn't make up monsters out of thin air but instead passed along descriptions relayed to him.) 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.
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, this beast sported heads on its joints — the standard identifier of demonic handiwork. 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."
Scientist: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
Though it probably looked monstrous to Renaissance Europeans, this depiction of an ostrich was pretty accurate. Paré described the ostrich in detail, and included a drawing of its skeleton. Paré borrowed a lot of his illustrations from the naturalist Conrad Gesner, and Gesner relied heavily on an old bestiary that was likely assembled in the fourth century. Calling the ostrich a "sparrow camel," the bestiary claimed that the giant bird would ditch its eggs in the sand, return some time later, and hatch the eggs by staring at them. This fit with the belief that eyes emitted a kind of ray or light beam.
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.
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: 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.