Year: 1570
Scientist/artist: Abraham Ortelius
Originally published in: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
This excerpt of a map of Iceland by a Flemish cartographer shows sea monsters that some believed inhabited the surrounding waters. Some speculation about this monster-riddled map, however, is that it aimed to dissuade Europeans from moving to an island that the current settlers preferred to keep to themselves.
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Year: 1570
Scientist/artist: Abraham Ortelius
Originally published in: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Now appears in: "Early Modern Brave New World?" by Ciobanu Estella Antoaneta in The Annals of Ovidius University Constanta
Ortelius didn't confine exotic sea creatures in his maps to the relatively familiar waters of Northern Europe. In the Pacific Ocean, he envisioned big, gluttonous whales attacking passing ships, and preening sirens waiting to seduce the sailors.
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Year: 1603
Scientist/artist: Abraham Ortelius
Originally published in: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Now appears in: "A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World" by Papadopoulos and Ruscillo in American Journal of Archaeology
Ortelius issued another version of his famous map in 1603, including this detail of what he identified as the Steipereidur. Despite its fearsome teeth, Ortelius considered this animal the tamest of whales, explaining that it "fights other whales on behalf of fishermen."
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Year: 1539
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Carta Marina
Now appears in: The Book of Fabulous Beasts and Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
Many of the creatures in Ortelius's map were inspired by the version released decades earlier by Olaus Magnus, a Catholic priest who left Scandinavia for Rome after the Reformation. Olaus (originally Olaf Mansson) became a significant chronicler of fabulous sea creatures.
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Year: 1539
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Carta Marina
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
Although many of the monsters that decorated Renaissance maps were just that — decorations — Olaus Magnus took great care to label the creatures on his Carta Marina and provide an explanatory key to what they were, which suggests that he depicted animals he believed to be real. And some of the animals on his map can be related to real animals, such as the walrus, the blue whale and the giant squid. But other animals were more fanciful. This sea monster duo includes a lobster, just one described as 12 feet long. The monster dining on lobster is apparently a sea rhinoceros, but unlike most of the other sea monsters on Olaus's map, this one was not named in his key. The sea rhino was likely inspired by a real animal, but not one that ever lived in the ocean.
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Year: 1555
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
Now appears in: Olaus Magnus's Sea Serpent by Joseph Nigg in Public Domain Review
Giant lobsters also made an appearance in a book that Olaus Magnus wrote about the "northern peoples." In this scene, smaller versions, some of them oddly airborne, surround two giant lobsters in the water near a ship. One of the horrifying beasts snatches a sailor out of the ship and into the water. The lobsters look very much like the real animals, but it's hard to say what, besides exaggeration, could account for their size.

Year: 1539
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Carta Marina
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
After pointing out that a "monstrous Fish" appeared off the coast of England in 1532, Olaus Magnus wrote, "Now I shall revive the memory of a monstrous Hog that was found afterwards, Anno 1537, in the same German Ocean, and it was a Monster in every part of it. For it had a Hog's head, and a quarter of a Circle, like the Moon, in the hinder part of its head, four feet like a Dragon's, two eyes on both sides of his Loyns, and a third in his belly inkling toward his Navel; behind he had a Forked-Tail, like to other Fish commonly." Olaus Magnus then went on to compare the beast to heretics who, he believed, lived like swine. The naturalist had been born a Catholic, but his homeland of Sweden, like most of northern Europe, was Protestant by the time he produced his map so rich in sea monsters. Remaining a Catholic, Olaus was evetually named Archbishop of Uppsala, though he had hardly any fellow believers to oversee there; he and his brother had already moved to southern Europe. His Catholic disdain for Protestants was more than reciprocated, with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon distributing pictures of a "pope-ass" and a "monk-calf." Besides claiming thousands of lives, Europe's religious divisions in the 16th and 17th centuries caused a renewed interest in monsters (sea bishops proliferated) with Christians of both flavors blaming each other for the weird new creatures.

Year: 1555
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
Now appears at: Olaus Magnus' Monstrous Creatures (https://www.rug.nl/library/heritage/exhibitions/virtual-exhibitions/olaus-magnus?lang=en)
Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina map and Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus book had more in common than the topic; design and illustration style also unified the publications. The book bore roughly 100 images remarkably similar to those in the map. Occasionally, though, the book illustration would share additional details. This weird little devil-horned fish appeared in the book illustration of the sea swine illustration.

Year: 1598
Scientist/artist: Willem Barentsz
Originally published in: Three Navigations by Dutchmen to Northern Lands, Scandinavia, Moscovy, and Novaya Zemlya
Now appears in: Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond by Kenneth Nebenzahl
Though unusually colorful and flamboyant compared to the actual animals, these late-16th-century whales appear less monstrous than creatures inhabiting maps made just a few decades earlier. The gaggles of pinnipeds poking their heads above the sea surface also look more realistic. It's not surprising that the animals would be more realistic given that Barentsz earned a reputation for accurate depictions of landmasses of the Arctic regions.
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Year: 1644
Scientist/artist: Willem Janszoon Blaeu
Originally published in: Le Theatre du Monde
Now appears at: Evolution of the Map of Africa from the Princeton University Library
This snippet of sea monsters and ships comes from an expansive map of Africa and the surrounding seas. Made during the "Golden Age" of Dutch mapmaking, Blaeu's map was reprinted multiple times between 1631 and 1667. The water-spouting sea monster in the upper left looks big enough to swallow a ship. The fanciful flying fish in the lower left are hard to identify, though they bear some resemblance to fossil sharks known as Iniopterygiformes.

Year: 1562
Scientist/artist: Diego Gutiérrez
Originally published in: Americae Sive Qvartae Orbis Partis Nova Et Exactissima Descriptio
Now appears at: Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/)
The winged fish in the upper right does bear a resemblance to a real animal, albeit an extinct one: an Iniopterygian. And the frowning swimmer in the lower right is a pretty recognizable dolphin, even if it's uncharacteristically grumpy for a cetacean. The most interesting creature is the one in the left half of the image carrying a human passenger. That odd animal bears a combination of mismatched features: sea-serpent tail, mammalian face with an almost human expression, winged arms and front flippers. (The humanoid figure with the shell should probably pass without comment.) The ocean was still full of unknowns in the 16th century, and maritime travel would remain perilous for centuries to come. No doubt sailors and their sweethearts worried about sea creatures, but it's also possible that some of these illustrations served as pure decoration.
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Year: 1573-1585
Scientists: Guillaume Rondelet and Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
In his book on monsters, Paré mentioned two fish described earlier by Rondelet. One was described as a plume because it resembled feathers worn on caps. He went on to say that this fish "shines at night like a star." The other fish was described as "like a bunch of grapes." Perhaps the so-called plume could be explained by a fleeting glimpse of a nudibranch, jellyfish, flatworm, or annelid, and plenty of marine animals are bioluminescent. Explaining the bunch of grapes, however, is harder. Much harder. It looks like the Muppet Gonzo dressed in a floral-print bodystocking, neither of which existed in the 16th century.
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Year: 1573-1585
Scientist: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
Whatever misconceptions existed about cetaceans in his day, Paré relayed what was likely an accurate account of whale hunting, explaining that whenever a whale was sighted in one seaside city, "all the inhabitants of the town run to the spot with whatever of their equipment is necessary to catch it. . . . and with all their might they throw [their harpoons] upon the whale, and when they perceive that it is wounded — which is recognized by the blood that is issuing from it — they loosen the ropes of their [harpoons], and follow it so as to fatigue it and catch it more easily; and drawing it on board, they rejoice and are merry; and they divide [it] up, each getting his portion according to the duty he will have performed." This woodcut, possibly borrowed from an earlier source, has some hits and misses. The blowhole, issuing a plume, isn't bad. The tail looks like that of a fish, but more conspicuous are the menacing eye and man-sized tusks. Perhaps the tusks served the purpose of making this cetacean-human encounter appear more evenly matched.
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Year: 1680
Scientists/artists: Edward Tyson and Robert Hooke
Originally published in: Phocæna, or The Anatomy of a Porpess
Now appears in: Wicked Intelligence by Matthew Hunter
Tyson based his engraving on illustrations by Hooke, and there's much to admire in this picture. But the circumstances of the anatomical study were, by today's standards, pretty odd. In Restoration London, the place to hang out (if you were a man and they'd let you in) was a coffeehouse. By 1700, several hundred had sprung up around the city. Multifaceted researcher and founder member of the Royal Society of London, Hooke was said to visit multiple coffeehouses daily, to catch up on the latest gossip and scientific debates. Garraway's ranked among his favorites; when he started his own splinter philosophical club, he and his pals gathered at Garraway's. In November 1679, he bought himself a "sea hog" (porpoise). It was no longer living, and refrigeration was nowhere near invented yet, so the specimen would have been slippery and aromatic by the time he took possession of it. He took it straight to Garraway's. And started dissecting it right there in the middle of debating coffee drinkers. Not the kind of thing you'd hope to see at Peabody's or Starbuck's.

Year: 1715
Originally published as: Italian broadside
Now appears in: Whale Ships and Whaling by George Francis Dow
In this early-18th-century whaling scene, the whale sports oddly human-looking eyes and pectoral fins that look a little like flappy ears. It appears to float on the surface of the water, but this scene might simply show the cetacean breaching. George Francis Dow saw fit to include this image in his retrospective on whaling, originally published in 1925.
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Century: 12th
Originally appeared in: Church of Saint Martin in Zillis, Switzerland
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
The painted ceiling of the Church of Saint Martin serves as a sort of medieval bestiary. Surrounding the Earth on the church ceiling is an ocean populated by an assortment of hybrid creatures, each one a land animal mixed with a fish. The ceiling boasted a horse fish, goat fish, rooster fish, etc. One of the hybrids was an elephant fish. This picture suggests that the painter had some idea of what an elephant trunk looks like — notable since medieval Europeans didn't often see elephants. It also reflects the belief common at the time that every land-dwelling animal had a marine counterpart.

Year: 1491
Originally appeared in: Hortus Sanitatis
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
The common medieval belief that every land animal had its counterpart in the sea didn't just play out on church ceilings; printed bestiaries also highlighted marine versions of familiar animals. This woodcut from Hortus Sanitatis features a sea cow (top), sea dog (middle), and sea horse (bottom). Medieval and Renaissance Europeans also believed the vast ocean held watery counterparts of things they could see in the sky. Remnants of these old beliefs linger in the names of some aquatic and marine animals today, such as catfish and starfish.
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Year: 1491
Originally appeared in: Hortus Sanitatis
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
This woodcut is labeled "pistris," a term Nigg likens to "prister" or "physter." It may have been loosely based on a sperm whale. Although The King's Mirror, a 13th-century manuscript written in Old Norwegian, characterized the sperm whale as a gentle giant, a more common view was that the cetaceans were malicious. In the 16th century, Olaus Magnus opined, "They roam about in all the seas looking for ships, and when they find one they leap up, for in that way they are able to sink and destroy it the more quickly." This illustration shows a scaly creature with legs and a pig-like snout attempting to do just that.
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Year: 1727
Scientist: Peter Kolb
Originally published in: Naaukeurige en uitvoerige beschryving van kaap de Goede Hoop
Image provided by: Biodiversity Heritage Library (some rights reserved)
In his book about the Cape of Good Hope, Kolb mixed the accurate with the fantastic. On the same page that showed dorsal and ventral views of a ray, this creature appeared. It's hard to say what, if any, actual marine animal might have inspired this picture. The label translates to "sea-lion" and it does look like a feline transmogrifying into a fish. Perhaps this was another example of an assumed marine counterpart to every terrestrial animal.

Year: 1491
Originally appeared in: Hortus Sanitatis
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer (also discussed in Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg)
"Polypus" means multi-legged, but the term didn't tell medieval and Renaissance Europeans very much about any other aspect of the animal's body. Decades after this woodcut appeared in Hortus Sanitatis, Olaus Magnus showed the polyp on his map Carta Marina and discussed the animal in his book Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. But while the map showed an animal that looked like a big lobster, the book described an animal sounded more like an octopus. This image looks like neither. Instead, it looks like the artist took advice along the lines of, "Well, it's a fish with eight legs."
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Year: 1572
Scientist: Gerard Mercator
Originally published in: Europae Descriptio, Emendata
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
The man who gave us the Mercator Projection produced more than a projection. He also produced pictures of sea monsters. This monster looks whimsical, with a face resembling a bird's. Five proboscidian trunks sprout from the sea monster's head, all blowing water, steam or mist. Its back end is a fairly standard-issue coiling sea-serpent tail.
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Year: 1567
Scientist/artist: Giacomo Gastaldi
Originally published in: La Descriptione dela Puglia
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
More whimsical than menacing, this marine creature looks like a friendly mammal that just happens to have webbed feet and live in the ocean. Van Duzer notes that some of Gastaldi's 16th-century maps showed creatures such as camels and elephants on the giant landmass assumed to exist in the Southern Hemisphere — even though naturalists of his time knew that cold conditions likely predominated in both polar regions. Van Duzer remarks, "This abundance of geographically inappropriate monsters in the southern continent confirms the impression that the sea monsters give, namely that Gastaldi (or the buyers of his maps) was interested in monsters purely as exotic decoration, rather than as conveying information about what specific creatures lived in specific distant parts of the world."
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Year: c. 1550
Scientist/artist: Giacomo Gastaldi
Originally published in: Dell'Universale
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
If you like to dine on unlucky sailors, it pays to come equipped with spikes that can puncture ship hulls. Spikes and teeth sharpened, this monster eyes a nearby ship loaded with juicy, crunchy snacks. Van Duzer reports that a similar sea monster figures in André Thevet's Cosmographie, published in 1575.

Year: 1569
Scientist/artist: Giovanni Francesco Camocio
Originally published in: Cosmographia Vniversalis et Exactissima ivxta Postremam Neotericorvm Traditionem
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
Centuries ahead of the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch, an illustrator placed a similarly terrified, screaming face in the Indian Ocean. Because many of the maps rich in sea monsters were prepared for rich armchair travelers — who could afford the extra fees for the clever illustrations — it might be a mistake to assume that this fin-framed face belonged to a creature that anybody truly believed to be real. But monster lore did survive well beyond the late 16th century.
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Year: 1558
Publisher: Michaelis Tramezini
Originally published in: Septentrionalium Regionum Suetiae, Gothiae, Norvegiae, Daniae et terrarum adjacentium recens exactaque descriptio
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
Not only does this sea turtle fly, but it does so in the frigid waters of Northern Europe. This almost-smiling turtle might have been an exaggerated version of a sea turtle with front flippers transformed into wings, but Chet Van Duzer points out that another map published the same year by Arnold Nicolai bore an explanation that it was published "In Antwerp by Arnold Nicolai at the sign of the turtle," and that turtles also appeared around the text that accompanied the map. Van Duzer remarks, "This it seems that in the extravagant flying turtle we are to see a subtle advertisement for the publisher." This cheerful little creature was published by a different individual, but it wasn't the only example of Nicolai's flying turtle being copied; another winged turtle appeared in a map published 20 years later. So a possible advertisement might have been transformed into a creature that at least by some map readers came to regard as real.

Year: 1560
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Icones Animalium
Now appears in: "Monk Seals in Post-Classical History" by William Johnson in Mededelingen No. 39
Cherub-faced seals didn't please Mediterranean fishermen, who considered the animals deformed quadrupeds if not monsters. Yet everybody realized that the seals apparently had enemies of their own, such as the fearsome Ziphius. Here a Ziphius, with a face looking like a cross between an owl's and a worried human's, endures a bite from a porcine sea monster while munching on a hapless seal. The Ziphius might have been based on a killer whale or great white shark.

Century: 13th
Originally published in: Medieval manuscript
Image appears at: A Sawfish Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program
Discussed in: Physiologus translated by Michael Curley and Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
In literature and maps from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, creatures known as the swordfish, sawfish and Ziphius "morphed from one animal into another under different names," in the words of Joseph Nigg. Unlike the "rapier-billed" animals known as swordfish and sawfish today, the animals bearing these names during the Renaissance might have been inspired by the orca, or killer whale. And in medieval bestiaries, and the natural-history-as-moral-instruction book Physiologus, the swordfish/sawfish was an entirely different animal. It had wings. "There is an animal in the sea called the swordfish, which has long wings; and, when he sees the ships sailing, he imitates them and raises his wings and strives with the ships as they sail. Growing tired, after racing three or four miles or more, he folds up his wings and the waves carry him back to his former abode where he was at first. The sea is the world, the ships are the prophets and apostles who cross through this world. The swordfish who does not keep pace with the crossing ships represents those who are abstinent for a time but who do not persevere with good pace. These begin with good works but do not persevere to the end because of greed, pride, and love of wicked gain."

Year: 1580
Scientist/artist: Adriaen Coenen
Originally appeared in: Visboek
Image appears at: Adriaen Coenen's Fish Book (1580) in Public Domain Review
Adriaen Coenen was a fisherman and fish auctioneer living in the Dutch village of Scheveningen who made himself an authority on all things fishy. Respected by academics, he obtained some of the best journals of his day, and he replicated much of this material in his "Fish Book," a handmade book complete with ornate frames drawn around the subjects. But rumors repeated by broadsides and pamphlets also found their way into Coenen's book. One of the dubious creatures he described was the "tunnyfish" reputedly caught in the 1560s in the Mediterranean Sea. The fish's remarkable feature, relayed by the material Coenen consulted, was a set of tattoos or drawings that resembled ships. One can only wonder what tattoo parlor the tunnyfish frequented.

Year: 1638
Scientist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: De Piscibus
Now appears in: "Monk Seals in Post-Classical History" by William Johnson in Mededelingen No. 39
Like Conrad Gesner, Aldrovandi passed along his share of misinformation. In published books, misconceptions could multiply because many artists were illiterate. As a result, illustrations didn't always match the written descriptions they accompanied. It's hard to say what's more remarkable about this serpentine sea monster: it's precise aim in dousing a seal with a waterspout from its own head, or its ability to wriggle on the water's surface. Either way, the turtle observing the spectacle appears entertained.

Year: 1741
Scientist/artist: Sven Waxell
Originally published in: Bering's Voyages
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
This image shows, from left to right, a fur seal, a sea lion and a "sea cow." Although all three marine mammals have vaguely humanlike faces with haughty expressions, the accuracy of the sea cow is as good a rendition as we are likely to get. Hydrodamalis gigas, a giant relative of the manatee, was hunted to extinction in less than three decades after its discovery. With this animal, the real goof was wiping it off the face of the Earth.
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Year: 1755
Scientist/artist: Bishop Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan
Originally published in: Natural History of Norway
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
Besides believing tales of a "kraken" (an octopus-like creature) 1.5 miles in circumference, Bishop Pontoppidan also believed in sea serpents. In his book on the natural history of Norway, he relayed a description, dating from 1746, of a sea serpent resembling a horse with big black eyes, a long white mane and a body coiled like that of a snake.
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Year: 1848
Originally published in: Illustrated London News
Now appears in: "Richard Owen and the Sea-Serpent" by Brian Regal in Endeavour
In the mid-19th century, the captain and crew of Daedalus were convinced they had seen a sea serpent. Richard Owen was equally convinced they had not. When pressed for a hypothesis on what they had seen, he ventured a sea lion. Owen didn't dismiss "monsters" out of hand, having named a big group of extinct reptiles "deinos sauros" ("terrible lizard"), but he wanted physical evidence. The insistence on physical evidence — a carcass of a dead sea serpent, or a fossilized bone of an extinct one — was a change in common practice when it came to verifying the validity of sea-serpent stories. Such sightings were considered proven if eyewitness accounts could be assembled before a lawyer, judge, or other government official. When respectable citizens vouched for the existence of such a creature and respectable judges ruled their testimony truthful, challenging the monster's existence was bad form indeed.

Century: 19th
Originally published in: Lithograph engraved by J.H. Bufford and Company
Now appears in: "Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds" by Peter Dendle in Folklore
This sea serpent depiction combined realistic details — the eye, teeth, forked tongue, scales, and color patterns — with fancy. How could a serpent coil on top of the water like that? But the background was equally interesting. This giant serpent slithered over the water in close proximity to ships and a densely populated coast. The apparent intent of this lithograph was to argue that sea serpents not only existed, but that they existed in busy shipping lanes.

Year: 1561
Scientist: Gabriel Rebelo
Originally published in: História das Ilhas Maluco
Now appears in: "Secrecy, Ostentation, and the Illustration of Exotic Animals in Sixteenth-Century Portugal" by Palmira Fontes da Costa in Annals of Science
Rebelo's widely circulated manuscript included works by an unknown painter who used a naturalistic style to depict, in this case at least, an unnatural animal. (The artist might have been Rebelo himself.) Rebelo described the fish-cow as a rare specimen that he had only seen once. Although many exotic flora and fauna from Asia were regularly shipped to Lisbon during the 16th century, the Portuguese rarely published descriptions. If news circulated at all, it was usually in manuscript form.

Year: 1577
Scientist/artist: Jan Wierix
Originally published in: Three Beached Whales
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
This 16th-century engraving was actually a pretty good likeness, except for the extra blowhole. Two blowholes emerge from a "nose" that looks like it belongs to a terrestrial mammal. Wierix pictured three stranded whales, several more cetaceans behind them in the ocean and terrified humans fleeing up the beach.

Year: 1872
Scientist/artist: W.E. Webb
Originally published in: Buffalo Land
Now appears in: Oceans of Kansas by Michael J. Everhart
The sea-serpent, snake-like necks on the marine reptiles in this picture have proven implausible. Plesiosaurs might have been able to use their heads as rudders to change direction while swimming, but they couldn't very well swim in a straight line while turning their heads to take in the scenery. But while the curvy necks may have been wrong, the caption accompanying this image about "the sea that once covered the plains" in North America has turned out to be right. Fossil finds of sharks, bony fish, marine reptiles and mollusks have substantiated the hypothesis that a massive, shallow sea once covered the interior of North America.
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Year: 1863
Scientist: Louis Figuier
Artist: Édouard Riou
Originally published in: Earth Before the Deluge
Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Another picture of an ancient reptile sporting a whale-like blowhole is from Figuier's rendition. Not long after Darwin published The Origin of Species, scientists were making an uneasy peace with prehistory. Figuier wrote, "We shall see, in examining the curious series of animals of the ancient world, that the organization and physiological functions go on improving unceasingly, and each of the extinct genera which preceded the appearance of man, present for each organ, modifications which always tend towards greater perfection."

Year: c. 1902
Artist: F. John
Originally published as: Chromolithograph
Now appears in: Paleoart by Zoë Lescaze
In the early 20th century, a paleoartist who identified himself simply as F. John routinely copied decades-old works by other artists, embellishing with high-saturation colors. This image was a clear copy of Édouard Riou's maritime battle between an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur. As with Riou's mid-19th-century mistaken interpretation, this ichthyosaur sends water fountains through its whale-style dual blowhole. Similar to other scenes of prehistoric life, the battle in the foreground is complemented by an erupting volcano in the background.
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Year: c. 1855
Scientist: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
Now appears in: All in the Bones by Bramwell and Peck
The Crystal Palace reconstructions, launched with an Iguanodon-belly dinner party, probably counted among the high points of Waterhouse Hawkins's life, but even as crowds admired his sculptures, some scientists expressed concerns about accuracy. Whether or not those concerns reached the ears of the Crystal Palace Company directors, the company began to face financial trouble, and ended Waterhouse Hawkins's contract in July 1855. Searching for work, he sketched a design for this sea monster fountain. Like some mistaken ichthyosaur and plesiosaur reconstructions in the 19th century, this creature features dual blowholes.
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Year: 1868
Scientist/artist: E.D. Cope
Originally published in: "Fossil Reptiles of New Jersey" in American Naturalist
Now appears in: The Dinosaur Papers by Weishampel and White
Edward Drinker Cope was an early champion of bipedalism in some dinosaurs, and as the 19th century wore on, a growing inventory of theropod fossils would support his argument. But this illustration also shows his initial interpretation of the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus. Cope argued that Elasmosaurus was bigger than Plesiosaurus described decades earlier in Britain. Cope also thought his new plesiosaur genus had a relatively short neck and very long tail, and that it relied more on its long tail than its flippers to move through the water. Cope was wrong. He hadn't found a plesiosaur with a completely different body shape. He had simply mounted the head on the wrong end of the body, a mistake that provided Cope's fossil-hunting rival, O.C. Marsh, a great deal of schadenfreude.
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Year: 1869
Scientist/artist: E.D. Cope
Originally published in: Synopsis of the Extinct Batrachia, Reptilia and Aves of North America
Image provided by: Biodiversity Heritage Library
Cope followed up his "Fossil Reptiles of New Jersey" paper with a book, which included this picture of his mistaken articulation of Elasmosaurus. Given the abundance of extant and extinct reptiles, such as crocodiles, with short necks and long tails, Cope's mistake was kind of understandable. But he might have done himself a favor to give more weight to long-necked plesiosaur fossils found by earlier fossil diggers. His desire to defeat his arch-rival Marsh might have driving his conviction that he'd found something wholly unprecedented.
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Year: 1873
Scientist/artist: John William Dawson
Originally published in: The Story of Earth and Man
Now appears at: Internet Archive
A motley assortment of marine reptiles cozy up with cephalopods in this scene. The caption describing the species didn't quite match with the animals depicted in 1873, but a couple could be easily recognized. On is the ichthyosaur that practically floats on the water surface across the middle of the picture. Another is E.D. Cope's not-yet-corrected, short-necked, long-tailed Elasmosaurus. Near the right edge of the picture, the elasmosaur dangles its forked tongue, goggle eyes staring right at the reader. It's almost a cartoon villain.
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Year: 1897
Artist: Charles R. Knight
Originally published in: The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Charles Sternberg
Now appears at: The Snake-Necked Elasmosaurus (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:The_Snake-necked_Elasmosaurus.jpg)
Edward Drinker Cope first identified the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus and made the significant mistake of placing its head on the end of its tail. Cope apparently based his initial reconstruction on his work with lizards. His mistake had been corrected by the time Charles Knight produced this illustration, but while this picture was far more accurate, it was still problematic. Modern reconstructions of Elasmosaurus indicate that its neck wasn't flexible enough to coil like a snake.

Year: 1843
Scientist: George Richardson
Artist: George Nibbs
Originally published in: Geology for Beginners
Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick and Fossil Revolution by Douglas Palmer
According to the caption in the original publication, this picture shows "the ichthyosaurus in the act of devouring a fish; the plesiosaurus, which has seized a pterodactyle, or flying reptile, on the wing; together with crocodiles and alligators, which are depicted on the shores. Turtles and tortoises are prowling on the banks, and the waters of this primeval sea are tenanted by corals, shells, crustacea, and fish, appropriate to this peculiar period of the history of nature." Although this image does give the plesiosaur a dragon-like appearance, the scene is much less apocalyptic than other depictions of prehistoric life at the time; this picture looks cheerful, except maybe for the poor creatures becoming meals.

Year: 1851
Scientist: Franz Unger
Artist: Josef Kuwasseg
Originally published in: The Primitive World in Its Different Period of Formation
Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick
In keeping with the artistic convention of making the prehistoric Earth look perpetually apocalyptic, this scene shows moonlight and menacing clouds over a turbulent sea. Using another artistic convention, the scene shows low tide — enabling the reader to see the sea lilies and shells on the sea floor. The reptile is a Nothosaurus. Modern depictions of the animal look less crocodilian, but this image is in keeping with modern interpretations in showing a semiaquatic animal that could live in water or on land.
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Year: 1883
Artist: A. Demarly
Originally published as: The Plesiosaur and the Ichthyosaur of the Lias Period
Now appears in: Paleoart by Zoë Lescaze
A plesiosaur, an ichthyosaur and an apparent squid engage in a three-way confrontation in a choppy sea under a threatening sky. This late-19th-century engraving upholds a tradition that started decades earlier, according to Zoë Lescaze. She writes, "The study of prehistoric marine reptiles began in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which were characterized by spectacular maritime battles. This context shaped both scientific conceptions and artistic depictions of the aquatic creatures, giving rise to assumptions that they were inherently violent." The plesiosaur appears grouchy. The ichthyosaur looks like a cheerful warrior. The cephalopod's expression is harder to read.
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Year: c. 1895
Inspired by: E.D. Cope
Originally published by: Chocolat Suchard
Now appears at: Copyright Expired (http://www.copyrightexpired.com/Dinosaurs_Trading_Cards_Post_Cards/Trading-Cards-Post-Cards-Dinosaurs-Elasmosaurus.html)
The Swiss maker of chocolate bars and cocoa powder found a way to broaden the appeal of its products, as if that were necessary when the product was chocolate. Suchard also issued trading cards featuring prehistoric life. Unfortunately, the cards were less accurate than they were artistic and just plain fun. Issued toward the end of the 19th century, this card repeats Cope's mistake in initially describing Elasmosaurus: putting its head on the end of its tail. The plesiosaur actually had a long neck and short tail.

Year: c. 1895
Inspired by: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
Originally published by: Chocolat Suchard
Now appears in: Paleoart by Zoë Lescaze
This plesiosaur's undulating neck and forked tongue were likely inspired by Hawkins's mid-19th-century reconstructions at Crystal Palace. Though this pretty little picture was good enough for a complimentary card issued with candy, paleontological art largely moved on from Hawkins's interpretations in the late 19th century. His career was largely over by the late 1870s. He died in 1894, around the time that a Swiss chocolate company issued this trading card.
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Year: c. 1872
Artist: Archibald Willard
Now appears in: Paleoart by Zoë Lescaze
This livid plesiosaur is a detail from a painting by the same artist who gave us the Spirit of '76 — a drumming, flute-playing trio of patriots in America's Revolutionary War. Exhibiting a dragon-like neck and demon-like anger, this ancient marine reptile has been outfitted with claws rather than the flippers found in actual fossils. It inhabits a canvas populated with other dragon-like prehistoric monsters. Though prehistoric life had been depicted many times in Europe, Lescaze describes Willard's work as the "earliest known oil painting of primordial animals made in North America."
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Year: c. 1911
Artist: Heinrich Harder
Now appears at: Plesiosaur on Land (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Plesiosaur_on_land.jpg)
Also discussed in: Paleoart by Zoë Lescaze; Marine Reptiles from the Paleobiology Research Group, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol (http://www.palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/ Palaeofiles/Pictures/marine/)
Designed in the era of Art Nouveau, the Berlin Aquarium opened to great fanfare in 1913. The Allied bombing of Berlin 30 years later largely flattened the aquarium, which was rebuilt a decade later. In 1977, aquarium director Heinz-Georg Klös found something that, remarkably, had survived World War II: original plans for the bombed-out building. Appealing to the public for saved photos or postcards of the original structure, Klös began a project to recreate murals of prehistoric life. In the early 1980s, the recreations were completed, in flamboyant Miami Vice colors. Harder's surviving plesiosaur picture, alas, lacks the pretty pastels, but preserves what some paleontologists believed in the early 20th century. Some argued that plesiosaurs waddled up onto land to lay eggs, like modern marine turtles. Recent fossil finds suggest that at least some plesiosaurs gave live birth, similar to modern whales.

Year: 1799
Scientist: Barthélemy Faujas de Saint Fond
Originally published in: Montagne de Saint-Pierre
Now appears in: Bursting the Limits of Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick
By the late 18th century, Europe's savants had begun wrapping their brains around the concept of an ancient Earth that had both predated humans by an unimaginable time span and crawled with strange creatures. The savants also hired capable artists and engravers to render accurate depictions of the fossils they found. The year 1780 marked the discovery of an enormous fossil reptile in underground quarries near the Dutch town of Maastricht. Nineteen years later, Faujas published a description of the reptile. The excavation picture may be a little dramatic, but the illustration of the fossil itself is pretty accurate (the oval-shaped objects with the skull are fossil sea urchins). Faujas's interpretation wasn't quite as accurate as the pictures. He classified it as a giant crocodile. Today, the fossil is identified as a mosasaur, an extinct marine reptile. Considering how little was then known about prehistoric life, Faujas's mistake is pretty forgivable.
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Year: c. 1876
Artist: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
Originally appeared in: Museum of Natural History, Princeton University
Now appears in: Princeton University Art Museum (http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/ collections/objects/45402)
In this picture of the early Jurassic, Waterhouse Hawkins shows an ichthyosaur almost defying physics, perched at the edge of a waterfall to confront a plesiosaur on the nearest shore. The plesiosaur might be on land for the necessity of laying eggs considering Waterhouse Hawkins painted this picture before paleontologists found evidence of live birth in those marine reptiles. A slightly less forgivable mistake is the plesiosaur's serpentine neck. In the background is a row of similarly snake-necked plesiosaurs (shown in the detail image below) looking like pieces of a Dale Chihuly chandelier.
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Year: 1605-1673
Scientist: Richard Verstegan
Originally published in: A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities
Now appears in: Hathi Trust Digital Library
Richard Verstegan (also known as Richard Rowlands) roamed Europe, writing about antiquities, religion, government and culture in the combustible times of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. First published at the dawn of the 17th century, and reprinted years after the author's death, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities Concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation includes the first known illustration of British fossils. But this picture, described as "great bones of fishes found in the earth," actually shows the vertebrae of fossil reptiles, namely plesiosaurs. Verstegan's mistake is understandable considering plesiosaurs lived in the same watery environment as fish. He probably had no trouble identifying the mollusk shells.

Year: 1719
Scientist: William Stukeley
Originally published in: Philosophical Transactions
Now appears in: Erasmus Darwin and Evolution by Desmond King-Hele
In 1718, Charles Darwin's great-grandfather, Robert, found a fossil. Filling a slab about 3 feet long and 2 feet wide, it held 16 vertebrae and nine ribs. Robert Darwin gave the fossil to the Royal Society of London, and William Stukeley wrote a paper about it, which was published the following year. Stukeley described the fossil as "a rarity, the like whereof has not been observ'd before in this Island." He was right about that. He continued that it "cannot be reckon'd Human, but seems to be a Crocodile or Porpoise." He was partially right about that. It wasn't human. But it wasn't a porpoise or crocodile, either, though crocodile wasn't a bad guess. In fact, Charles Darwin's great-grandfather found the first recognized fossil of a Jurassic reptile, one that spent even more of its time in the water that a crocodile would. It was a plesiosaur. A generation later, Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, would puzzle over fossils turned up in canal excavation, animals only partially resembling modern life forms. Erasmus Darwin would begin to suspect what biologists understand today: Life evolves.
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Year: 1834
Scientist: Thomas Hawkins
Originally published in: Memoirs of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri
Now appears in: Internet Archive
Discussed in: The Dragon Seekers by Christopher McGowan and "Thomas Hawkins and Geological Spectacle" by Ralph O'Connor in Proceedings of the Geologists' Association
Thomas Hawkins was passionate about paleontology, eccentric (as the Brits like to euphemize lunacy in affluent people), and sometimes dishonest. Hawkins was convinced he had the world's best collection of Mesozoic marine reptiles, and he might have been right. Writing both men separately, he convinced William Buckland and Gideon Mantell, the men who formally described the first dinosaurs known to science, that his own collection was worth a fortune. Buckland then persuaded the trustees of the British Museum to buy Hawkins's collection, and after the fossils were delivered, museum natural history curator Charles König gave a 25-foot-long ichthyosaur a closer inspection. He soon suspected something was off. The delivered fossil was several feet longer and more complete than the specimen pictured in Hawkins's Memoirs. That image, spanning two pages in Hawkins's collection catalog, is shown here. With the aid of a small knife, König confirmed that Hawkins had "completed" a fin (outlined in black in this image) and several feet of the tail. The ensuing scandal eventually involved the British House of Commons. Just how unethical Hawkins's behavior was is actually open to debate. Aiming to make specimens look complete, many museums supplemented fossils with plaster well into the 20th century. This ichthyosaur is still on display in the Natural History Museum, London.
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Year: 1886
Scientist/artist: Henry Woodward
Originally published in: The Geological Magazine
Now appears in: Resurrecting the Shark by Susan Ewing
Around 1884, a man with the surname of Davis (his first name is lost to history) found a strange, fragmentary fossil in Western Australia. It was curved, and it bore what looked like teeth. Mr. Davis gave the fossil to a naturalist, the Reverend J.G. Nicolay, who passed it along with the request that it be named for its finder. A photo of the fossil, followed up by the object itself, reached the British desk of Henry Woodward, editor of The Geological Magazine. Woodward later recounted, "I readily identified the fossil photographed as the impression of a fish-spine, similar in form, but more highly curved than those . . . originally described by Prof. Leidy as a fish-jaw, and named by him Edestus vorax in 1855." In fact, the good Professor Joseph Leidy had been right about the teeth part. The fossil Woodward identified consisted of teeth, not spines. In fairness, Edestus was not easy to identify. The fossil comprised a curved line of teeth, and it was a pioneering female paleontologist, Fanny Rysam Mulford Hitchcock, who realized that the Edestus fossil was a midline tooth structure. Think about your own teeth. On both your upper and lower jaw, you have two pairs of incisors, a pair of canines, two pairs of premolars, and (depending on whether you've had your wisdom teeth yanked out) two or three pairs of molars. In other words, on both jaws, your teeth come in pairs. In Edestus, there were medial lines of teeth sprouting from the front of the fish. That's kind of weird. Weirder still, though Woodward originally identified this fossil as Edestus davisii, it later proved to be a partial whorl of the spiral-toothed Permian shark Helicoprion. Helicoprion would be described by Alexander Karpinsky in 1899, and reconstructing that species would entail a series of colorful mistakes for more than a century.

Year: 1899
Scientist/artist: Alexander Karpinsky
Originally published in: On the Edestid Remains and its New Genus Helicoprion in Zapiski Imperatorskoy Akademii Nauk
Now appears in: "A New Specimen of Helicoprion Karpinsky, 1899 from Kazakhstanian Cisurals and a New Reconstruction of its Tooth Whorl Position and Function" by O.A. Lebedev in Acta Zoologica
Before the first dinosaurs walked the Earth, a strange breed of sharks swam its oceans. Dating to about 270 million years ago, Helicoprion left few remains for paleontologists, having bodies made of cartilage. What remains have been found defy easy explanation because they consist of teeth arranged in whorls with older, smaller teeth in the middle of the whorl, and newer, bigger teeth around the perimeter. Scientists across Eurasia and North America offered multiple explanations for the odd fossil, and some of the earliest interpretations showed the whorl teeth as defensive weapons, as in this illustration by Karpinsky. More recent interpretations of Helicoprion fossils place the whorl in the lower jaw, teeth facing upward — a circular saw in the mouth. So earlier paleontologists can certainly be forgiven for their misfires; the real animal was hardly less weird than guesses from a century ago.

Year: 1902
Scientist/artist: F. John
Published in: Tiere der Urwelt (http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ werkansicht/?PPN=PPN743975073 &DMDID=DMDLOG_0010)
Discussed in: "Jaws for a Spiral-Tooth Whorl: CT Images Reveal Novel Adaptation and Phylogeny in Fossil Helicoprion" by Tapanila, Pruitt, Pradel, Wilga, Ramsay, Schlader and Didier in Biology Letters
A few years after Kaminsky placed the Helicoprion whorl of teeth on its snout, John showed the whorl protruding from the mouth like a demonic, toothy tongue. How the fish could eat with this thing in the way isn't clear. Other interpretations have placed the whorl on the tip of the tail, or on top of the animal where the dorsal fin would be. The weird whorl teeth have inspired the long-term artistic fascination of fish-and-fossil artist Ray Troll.

MAIN IMAGE
Year: 2014
Scientists: Long Cheng, Xiao-Hong Chen and Qing-Hua Shang in "A New Marine Reptile from the Triassic of China, with a Highly Specialized Feeding Adaptation" in Naturwissenschaften
Artist: © Julius Csotonyi
Appears at: Atopodentatus Will Blow Your Mind

INSET
Year: 2016
Scientists: Li Chun, Olivier Rieppel, Cheng Long and Nicholas C. Fraser in "The Earliest Herbivorous Marine Reptile and Its Remarkable Jaw Apparatus" in Science Advances
Artist: Y. Chen © IVPP
Appears at: Ancient Hammerhead Creature May Have Been World's First Vegetarian Sea Reptile
Atopodentatus unicus lived around 244 million years ago in what is now China. Fossil remains described in 2014 were well-preserved, except for the head, where nature played a cruel trick on paleontologists (main image). The fossilization process had apparently folded the animal's mouth, prompting the original team of scientists to hypothesize that the animal fed flamingo style, foraging in the mud for tiny invertebrates. Science writer Brian Switek described the mouth as "a zipper smile of little teeth." In 2016, better-preserved remains of Atopodentatus unicus pushed a serious rethink about the reptile's face (inset). The new interpretation shows a wide, flat, vacuum-style mouth designed to scrape algae off rocks. In fairness to the 2014 research team, the new interpretation is (a) a hammerhead, "a shape previously unknown in the reptilian fossil record," according to Science News, (b) perhaps the oldest recognized marine reptile that subsisted on plants, and (c) still weird, just in a different way.

Year: 1766-1785
Scientist: Buffon
Originally published in: Histoire Naturelle
Now appears in: Buffon by Jacques Roger
The setting — atop a table, in front of a locked chest — might seem strange to the modern viewer, but the animal likely looks familiar. The gentle-looking creature that seems to sport a smile is a manatee. Buffon's pretty accurate rendition of what was possibly an inspiration for some mermaid myths marked a step forward in marine biology.
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Year: 1648
Scientist: Francisco Hernández
Originally published in: Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus
Now appears in: "South American Mammal Diversity and Hernandez's Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus" by Ernesto Capanna in Rendiconti Lincei, April 2009 issue
Pictures like this give the distinct impression that early glimpses of manatees were, indeed, fleeting. This surprised-looking creature — shaped like a stylized seal with muscular cheeks and equine, hoofed legs — actually accompanied a pretty precise, accurate textual description. The illustrator must have employed a great deal of imagination.
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Year: 1817
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
"There was seen on Monday and Tuesday morning playing around the harbor between Eastern Point and Ten Pound Island, a SNAKE with his head and body about eight feet out of water, his head is in perfect shape as large as the head of a horse, his body is judged to be about FORTY-FIVE or FIFTY FEET IN LENGTH." So read a broadside published in Boston about a sea monster sighting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1817. This picture, produced at the time, shows the alleged sea monster. Multiple eye witnesses to sea serpent antics came forward, and a group of boys found what was initially assumed to be the creature's spawn. A naturalist who specialized in reptiles, however, pronounced the baby sea serpent to just be a deformed blacksnake.

Year: 1662
Scientist: Caspar Schott
Originally published in: Physica Curiosa
Now appears in: Visual Cultures of Science edited by Luc Pauwels
Caspar (also known as Gaspar or Kaspar) Schott was a one-time student and long-time collaborator of the German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Besides editing and defending Kircher's works, Schott published some of his own. This page from the second volume of his Physica Curiosa shows a motley assortment of sea monsters, including a fish resembling a monk (upper left), a marine monster looking suspiciously like a bishop (lower right), and two chimerical creatures with long, fishy tails. Similar depictions appeared in numerous works in the 16th and 17th centuries. Religious tensions of the time might have contributed to the strong resemblance between alleged monsters and clerical figures.

Year: 1696
Scientist: Johann Zahn
Originally published in: Specula Physico-Mathematico-Historica
Now appears at: NOAA Photo Library Treasures of the Library (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/ library/index.html)
Toward the end of the 17th century, Johann Zahn published a depiction of a sea monster looking vaguely like a cleric. Zahn relayed the information that this creature was fished out of the icy waters of the Baltic Sea in 1531. Although plenty of "sea bishops" looked formidable if not downright horrifying, this one bore a contemplative expression above his beard. The NOAA Photo Library characterizes this as a "relatively benign merman."
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Year: 1709
Scientist: Franz Reinzer
Originally published in: Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica
Now appears at: NOAA Photo Library Treasures of the Library (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/ library/index.html)
Influenced by fellow Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, Reinzer compiled a book with a broad scope, including philosophy, meteorology and astrology. In a single illustration, this philosophical tome managed to neatly encapsulate three varieties of maritime mayhem: a storm, a shipwreck and a sea monster. The sea monster looks slightly furry, vaguely porcine and almost cute. Reinzer didn't get to see his book in print; it was published a year after he died.
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Year: 1662
Scientist: Caspar Schott
Originally published in: Physica Curiosa
Now appears at: NOAA Photo Library Treasures of the Library (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/ library/index.html)
In his Physica Curiosa, Schott included scores of illustrations, many of outlandish creatures, some closer to reality. What real-life animal might have inspired this illustration isn't easy to guess. It has gills, fringes, and a long curling tail, but the predominant feature is its gaping mouth lined with sharp teeth. The teeth are shaped like those of a shark.
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Year: 1820
Scientist: W. Scoresby
Originally published in: An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery
Now appears at: NOAA Photo Library Treasures of the Library (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/ library/index.html)
By the 19th century, even the early 19th century, more rational views had taken hold about fish and marine mammals. Scoresby provided a pretty plausible rendition of a Greenland shark (below) and narwhal above. Perhaps in jest, Scoresby described the horned marine mammal as a "Male Narwhal or Unicorn." Indeed, narwhal horns had been mistaken, at least by gullible buyers, as unicorn horns, capable of fending off the effects of poison.
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Year: 1560
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Icones Animalium
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
Gesner was one of the finest naturalists of the 16th century, but he occasionally misfired. In this woodcut, a mother whale and her young look awfully porcine.
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Year: 1539
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Carta Marina
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
The porcine whales in Gesner's books look similar to creatures in Olaus Magnus's map published years earlier. Besides pig-like snouts, they have dual-exhaust-style head spouts. The may key identified them as pristers, and in his book about the region, Olaus warned, "Sea monsters, huge as mountains, capsize the ships if they are not frightened away. . . . The Whirlpool, or Prister, is of the kind of Whales, two hundred Cubits long, and is very cruel." To scare off the monster, Olaus recommended noisy war trumpets or cannons, or pouring lye into the water. He also recommended "casting out huge great Vessels, that hinders this Monsters passage, or for him to play with all." Indeed, the worried sailors in this picture drop big barrels into the sea, perhaps hoping to distract the monsters with playthings. Joseph Nigg surmises that the prister legend might have been inspired by the sperm whale, though sperm whales rarely act as aggressively as Olaus indicated. Whether sperm whales truly measure 200 cubits long depends on how you size a cubit.
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Year: 1558
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: "Monk Seals in Post-Classical History" by William Johnson in Mededelingen No. 39 and Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
Gesner reproduced this picture of a Sea Devil (also called Triton marinus, Dæmon marinus, Satyrus marinus or Pan marinus) because the artist sending him the picture "had seen the monster alive." Gesner noted that one such creature had been captured in Norway and another in Rome. The Roman Sea Devil, he pointed out, didn't have horns. Gesner was such a prolific natural historian thanks largely to a wide network of associates. Unfortunately, many of them were superstitious mariners. This improbable creature is probably based on the monk seal. Once common in the Mediterranean, the species was decimated by human hunting. Fishermen considered the seals a smelly nuisance. So, apparently, did farmers. As Aristotle had a millennium earlier, both Gesner and fellow naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi passed along accounts of seals raiding orchards.
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Year: 1558
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner and The Book of Fabulous Beasts by Joseph Nigg
This "bearded whale" was originally reported by Olaus Magnus, who described a horned whale looking like "a tree rooted up by the roots." This fanciful depiction might have been inspired by a partial or fleeting view of a real animal, perhaps a giant squid.
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Year: 1694
Scientist/artist: Pierre Pomet
Originally published in: Histoire Générale des Drogues
Now appears in: The Unicorn by Nancy Hathaway
Pomet pictured both a sea unicorn (top) and a narwhal (bottom). Unlike the first creature, the second was real, and its horn was often mistaken — or deliberately passed off — as a unicorn horn, believed capable of curing all kinds of diseases and poisonings. As Europe's upper-crust families showed such a fondness for poisoning their own, such antidotes were always in demand. Not long after Pomet's book was published, the narwhal was identified as a "false unicorn."
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Year: 1560
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Nomenclator Aquatilium Animantium
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
Equipped with wings, this alleged flying fish was based on an illustration in a work by Olaus Magnus describing the northern seas. The face of this creature resembles that of a human more than a fish, with eyes positioned on the front of the head and the bridge of a nose.

Year: 1558
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis, Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen and "Foils and Fakes" by Suzanne Magnanini in Marvels & Tales Magazine
Hercules battled with a hydra in ancient Greek mythology, and this imaginary animal has suffered from a rotten reputation ever since. Unfortunately, the hydra has a living relative, of sorts: the octopus. Even now, misconceptions persist about the octopus (also called the "devil fish"), and it has been doomed to play the villain in more than one B movie. Although this illustration only shows seven heads, the hydra was sometimes said to have nine, and two new ones would appear whenever one was chopped off. This depiction of a hydra was typical of the time, i.e., a picture copied from another picture — probably taken from a publication about the Apocalypse. Though he published this image, however, Gesner was very skeptical about the creature's existence.

Year: 1558
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: The Science of Describing by Brian W. Ogilvie
Contrary to what we might guess today, Renaissance naturalists were plenty skeptical about many of the descriptions and illustrations they encountered. Getting by on a small salary in a landlocked country, however, Gesner couldn't see many sea creatures for himself. He had to rely on the work of others, including a book about the northern European ocean by Olaus Magnus. Of Magnus's sea creatures, Gesner wrote, "It seems that he depicted many according to seafarers' tales rather than from life." Still, Gesner published this picture of a walrus. Gesner had a big reservation about it: "Fish don't have feet." He confessed that fins can resemble feet in large fish skeletons, but thought the artist took too many liberties here (which he did). Why would Gesner think of a walrus as a fish? In the 16th century, naturalists weren't just grappling with unusual animals, but with their own methods of classifying them.
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Year: 1635
Scientist/artist: Juan Eusebio Nieremberg
Originally published in: Historia Naturae
Now appears in: The Science of Describing by Brian W. Ogilvie
Gesner suspected that the walrus (which he called "rosmarus") was the same as another creature known as "morss piscis." That was an accomplishment, considering how different they looked. This especially fuzzy, scrappy picture was likely made from a dried skin. Poorly preserved specimens and confusing illustrations meant that the two animals weren't recognized as the same thing until the end of the 17th century. Nieremberg published this illustration in a book about odd creatures, most of them from the New World. A similar looking animal also appeared in an engraving of the naturalist Ferrante Imperato's museum.
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Year: 1555
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
More outlandish than the walrus that Conrad Gesner depicted in 1558 were the mountain-sized animals that Olaus Magnus showed a few years earlier, with curving tusks protruding upward from their lower jaws. His accompanying text was a bit less hyperbolic than the picture, merely comparing their size to that of elephants. Olaus employed both terms in use at the time: rosmarus and morss. "The Norway Coast, toward the more Northern parts, hath huge great Fish as big as Elephants, which are called Morsi, or Rosmari, may be they are so from their sharp biting; for if they see any man on the Sea-shore, and can catch him, they come suddenly upon him, and rend him with their Teeth, that they will kill him in a trice . . . They will raise themselves with their Teeth, as by Ladders to the very tops of Rocks, that they may feed on the Dewie Grasse, or fresh Water, and role themselves in it, and then go to the Sea again . . ." Perhaps Olaus Magnus's source of information on the rosmarus had the bad luck to meet the marine mammals during mating season.

Year: 1516
Scientist/artist: Martin Waldseemüller
Originally published in: Carta Marina
Now appears in: Decoding the Morse: The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses by Natalie Lawrence in Public Domain Review
This very quadrupedal creature looks ill-suited to life in the ocean, looking more like an elephant missing its proboscis. Pliny once described a "sea elephant," perhaps in keeping with the long-held belief that every land animal had a marine equivalent. This early-16th-century depiction of the "morsus" might have been based on that belief, or might have resulted from confusion about the correct terminology for walruses. Walrus tusks had been traded for centuries, sometimes carved into exquisite pieces such as the Lewis Chessmen. But, as Lawrence explains, "Nobody except the hunters who killed walruses on the Arctic ice saw living walruses: carcasses were immediately channeled through the marketplaces of Northern European shores, into apothecary shops, curiosity cabinets, and natural histories." To confuse matters even more, Russians occasionally traded mammoth teeth around the same time.

Year: 1555
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
In his map and book on Scandinavia, Olaus Magnus didn't just describe monsters. He wrote about the occasional kind fish as well. This vignette, which resembled a similar picture in his map, shows a swimmer assailed by multiple small troublesome fish while simultaneously aided by the benevolent rockas, or ray. The ray is trying to drive away the smaller fish, which he characterizes as "Sea-Dog fish," and spare the swimmer from drowning. Olaus compared the ray's kind actions to those of the dolphin, also believed to come to the aid of human swimmers in danger.

Year: 1555
Scientist/artist: Olaus Magnus
Originally published in: Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
It's not clear what the sea monster that Olaus Magnus referred to as a prister really was. It might have been inspired by the sperm whale, which is not so aggressive as the porcine animals shown here. Whatever the sea monster was, sailors under attack could deter their cetacean assailants by blowing noisy trumpets, throwing empty barrels sat the animals, or pouring lye into the water. This illustration also shows other hazards mariners faced: mean birds and sucking fish.

Year: 1558
Scientist/artist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
Olaus Magnus's monster-rich sea map included multiple creatures that inspired Conrad Gesner, even when Gesner had his doubts about the accuracy of the original illustration. One such animal was what Gesner termed the "boar whale." Ambroise Paré adapted the popular depiction and pointed out its "scailes set in a wonderfull order." Joseph Nigg speculates that the boar whale shown on Olaus Magnus's map might have been inspired by the walrus, and this animal certainly boasts walrus-style teeth, though they're pointing in the wrong direction. What might have inspired the tapestry-like body pattern remains a mystery.
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Year: 1551
Scientist/artist: Pierre Belon
Originally published in: L'histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins
Now appears in: "Emergence of Vertebrate Zoology During the 1500s" by Frank N. Egerton in Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America October 2003 issue
In fact, this image provides a pretty accurate rendition of cetacean birth, although the cloud surrounding the baby is somewhat mysterious. At a time when naturalists were still puzzling over classifications of broad groups, however, Belon classified all flying vertebrates as birds and all swimming vertebrates as fish, including those that gave live birth.
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Century: 4th BC
Originally appeared in: Mosaic at Piazza Armerina, Sicily
Now appears in: Monsters: A Bestiary of the Bizarre by Christopher Dell
This Roman mosaic shows realistic fish and quasi-realistic cetaceans, but they surround two less realistic figures. A putto rides a sea monster, one sporting the head of a jackal, a mouth full of sharp teeth and a protruding tongue and, apparently, mutton chops. The sea monster might have been inspired by tempestuous seas as much as by a glimpse of any actual animal.

Year: 1734
Scientist: Albertus Seba
Artist: J. Fortuÿn (coloration)
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: "A Diverse and Marvelous Collection" by Müsch, Willmann and Rust in Natural History Magazine, April, 2002 issue and A Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba
Amsterdam apothecary Albertus Seba portrayed another hydra in the 18th century. Seba had his doubts about its authenticity, but more than one "respectable eye witness" vouched for the accuracy of the stuffed specimen, so he published this picture of it. Seba's mistake is understandable in light of the fact that most genuine animals were either preserved in spirits or stuffed by the time they reached him.

Year: 1758
Scientist: Albertus Seba
Artist: J. Fortuÿn (coloration)
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: "A Diverse and Marvelous Collection" by Müsch, Willmann and Rust in Natural History Magazine, April, 2002 issue and A Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba
Most of Seba's work was more realistic than the hydra. Though some mythological beasts persisted, during the 17th and 18th centuries, scholars began replacing superficial observation of the natural world with more detailed and careful study. Results included this depiction of a cuttlefish, an octopus relative.

Year: 1758
Scientist: Albertus Seba
Artist: J. Fortuÿn (coloration)
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: Natural Curiosities from the Cabinet of Albertus Seba by Albertus Seba
This picture doesn't show any egregious errors, only differences between the 18th century and the current day. Most shells are dextral, meaning if you hold the shell so the spire is up and the aperture is facing you, the aperture will usually be on your right side. In these shells, the aperture is flipped. Seba didn't accidentally flip every shell; printing techniques of the time produced mirror images. What's probably more striking is the artistic representation. This circular arrangement was actually part of a larger ornate page of mollusks. In Seba's day, the line between science and art was pretty fuzzy, but it arguably made the science more entertaining.

Year: 1605
Scientist: Carolus Clusius
Originally published in: Exoticorum Libri Decem
Now appears in: Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen
The trouble with trying to identify exotic species of blowfish from remote regions was that savants had to rely on dried specimens of dubious preservation. Working in the Netherlands, Clusius admitted that he couldn't dissect the fish to see their internal organs. Some of his contemporaries were starting to do just that, recognizing that superficial characteristics didn't tell the whole story. In the case of these blowfish, each woodcut represents what Clusius identified as a distinct species, but they were probably all the same species — preservation problems made them look so different.

Year: 1758
Scientist: Albertus Seba
Artist: J. Fortuÿn (coloration)
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: Natural Curiosities from the Cabinet of Albertus Seba by Albertus Seba
Seba portrayed a puffer fish, along with other denizens of the sea in his Thesaurus. Like other naturalists, Seba frequently relied on dried specimens. As in other illustrations he produced, this depiction shows an improvement over work from the previous century, although Seba gave the fish a strangely expressive face.

Year: 1709
Scientists/artists: Athanasius Kircher and Filippo Buonanni
Originally published in: Musæum Kircherianum
Now appears in: The Ecstatic Journey by Ingrid D. Rowland
The 17th-century German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher established a fabulous museum in Rome, filled with antiquities, speaking tubes, odd animals and fossils. Some of these "wonders" were too fantastic to be true. (Kircher believed every story he ever heard about someone catching a dragon — assuming that someone was a pope.) But much of what he collected was absolutely real. These fish carcasses and shark teeth must have looked outlandish to the visitors to Kircher's museum, but fish like these swim in the sea today. After Kircher died, Buonanni took over his collection and published a catalog in the early 18th century. These images from the catalog show some 18th-century progress in accurately depicting sea life.

Year: 1667
Scientist/artist: Niels Stensen
Originally published in: Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis and Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Strange as it looks by today's standards, this picture of a dissected head of a giant white shark actually marked significant progress in marine biology. For years, fossilized shark teeth were believed to be tongues of serpents turned to stone by Saint Paul, and hence were named glossopetrae, or "tongue stones." Niels Stensen correctly identified tongue stones as shark teeth, though he was not the first person in history to do so. In fact, Steno's picture was derived from a 16th-century unpublished work by papal physician Michele Mercati.
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Year: 1670
Scientist/artist: Agostino Scilla
Originally published in: Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense
Now appears in: "Agostino Scilla: A Baroque Painter in Pursuit of Science" by Paula Findlen in Science in the Age of Baroque
Although Steno's depiction of a dissected shark head was a step forward in scientific accuracy, Scilla felt he could improve upon Steno's work. Scilla was an accomplished painter and a coin collector. He believed — and informed his readers — that his experience in these fields gave him insights into fossils and other natural specimens that others could not. Rare were the ancient coins that depicted the same emperor and came from the same mint. Likewise, rare were the human faces that looked the same. Where others perhaps saw uniformity in sharks and their teeth, Scilla saw individuality. He delivered detailed depictions to different kinds of sharks, including a hammerhead, advancing accuracy even a little further than Steno.
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Year: c. 1775
Artist: Nicolaus Mettel
Originally published as: The True Picture of a Sea Dragon or Sea Wonder, which has 384 Teeth in its Jaws
Now appears in: Curious Beasts by Alison E. Wright
In contrast to the sober assessments of shark heads by Steno and Scilla from the previous century, this 18th-century etching of a dried shark head was much more sensational, with a name to match. The so-called sea dragon's eye leers at the viewer, perhaps sizing up a potential meal. The title and picture highlighted an accurate feature of the shark's anatomy: multiple rows of sharp teeth. This depiction's sensationalism likely had a shrewd purpose. It might have been an advertisement for the display of this creature at the 1775 Frankfurt Easter Fair.
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Year: 1558
Scientist/artist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears at: NYAMHistory (https://twitter.com/NYAMHistory/ status/1155856013100298240)
The New York Academy of Medicine kicked off 2019's Shark Week by tweeting Gesner's illustration of a great white shark. This doesn't look much like the animal we watched through our fingers in Jaws, most likely because it shows a dried specimen. This one's teeth, though still menacing, look longer and narrower than typical shark teeth. NYAMHistory points out that the animal bore two different identifications in Gesner's book: canis carcharias and lamia.

Year: 1575-1580
Artist: Joris Hoefnagel
Originally published in: Animalia Volatilia et Amphibia
Now appears in: Raw Pixel / National Gallery of Art (https://www.rawpixel.com/board/1354634/animalia-volatilia-et-amphibia-i-public-domain-biodiversity-drawings)
Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel eventually settled in the court of Rudolf II in Prague. Before that, Hoefnagel traveled across Europe, and he may have carried with him one of his masterworks, Four Elements. Intended to describe plants and animals of the known world, his whimsical illustrations mixed real and mythological creatures. In one illustration of sea life, the artist mingled dolphins, seals, a detailed shell, and this. It was labeled "Brethmechin."
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Year: 1648
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: Musaeum Metallicum
Now appears in: "The Geology Collections in Aldrovandi's Museum" by Carlo Sarti in Four Centuries of the Word Geology
Sixteenth-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi correctly rejected the notion that the biblical 40-day flood could embed shells inside the rocks of mountain ranges. He incorrectly endorsed the idea that fossils could grow in place from inorganic processes making crude imitations of living things. He clung to this belief even when he was astonished by the exquisite details of fossil fish. But fossilization was hardly understood in his day. (Aldrovandi lived a century before Stensen; Musaeum Metallicum was published more than 40 years after Aldrovandi's death). He didn't connect glossopetrae to sharks, but instead recommended them as an antidote for snake venom, to be mixed in wine or water.

Year: c. 520-510 BC
Now appears in: "A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World" by Papadopoulos and Ruscillo in American Journal of Archaeology and "Monk Seals in Antiquity" by Johnson and Lavigne in Mededelingen No. 35
This artifact, photographed from a private collection, shows a Greek hero fighting a creature known as the ketos. Showing some characteristics of sea serpents (frilly back and gaping, toothy mouth) and some of whales (flippers and a whale fin) might have been inspired by a glimpse of an actual whale. The fanciful depiction of this creature, however, contrasts with the accurate renditions of dolphins, an octopus and even a seal. The seal, mostly likely a monk seal, turns out to be a far more accurate rendition than most of the pictures that would follow in succeeding centuries.

Year: c. 130 BC
Now appears in: Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
The ketos figured prominently in Greco-Roman lore. Poseidon was said to have produced multiple sea creatures with his sea-nymph queen Amphitrite. Meaning "sea monster or very large fish," the term "ketos" apparently first appeared in Homer's epics, when Odysseus worried about an attack from one of Amphitrite's troublesome pets. This crested ketos carries a sea nymph on the silver lid of a circular container known as a pyxis. It was found at Canosa di Puglia, Italy.

Century: 1st BC
Now appears in: The Murderous, Sometimes Sexy History of the Mermaid (http://www.wired.com/2014/10/ fantastically-wrong-strange-murderous -sometimes-sexy-history-mermaid/) and Demetrius III Coin (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:DemetriusIIICoin.png)
Whatever real animal might have inspired the mermaid legend, a creature that is human above and fishy below the waist may also have had numinous roots. The earliest religious inspiration for the mermaid could be Atargatis, an ancient Syrian goddess associated with water and charged with safekeeping her worshippers' overall welfare. Belief in the goddess spread, eventually adopted by Greek culture. This crude but recognizable Atargatis came to share coin space with Demetrius III.

Year: 1754
Scientist/artist: Louis Renard
Originally published in: Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes
Now appears in: Renard's Book of Fantastical Fish (http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/ 2016/08/renards-book-of- fantastical-fish.html)
Just about every fish and arthropod appearing in Renard's book is "embellished" in some way, many with unusually bright colors, some with happy faces, some with odd proportions. But according to modern ichthyologist Theodore Pietsch, Renard's book should not be written off as worthless. Not only does it provide a picture of natural history in Renard's time, it also gives a picture, albeit a distorted one, of wildlife in the waters around Ambon, Indonesia. As those ocean waters are now polluted, Renard's book offers our only clues about much of the wildlife around Ambon in the 18th century. That said, almost 10 percent of the species shown in his book are imaginary. And here's a mermaid.
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Year: 1795
Originally published as: Broadsheet
Now appears in: Mermaids and Tritons in the Age of Reason by Vaughn Scribner in Public Domain Review
If you've guessed that, during the 18th century when the Age of Enlightenment was well into its second century, that reputable scholars and scientists had outgrown talk of mermaids and mermen, you've guessed incorrectly. No one less than Benjamin Franklin reported an apparent merman sighting in Pennsylvania Gazette in 1736. Decades later, after Franklin had signed the treaty to end the Revolutionary War with Britain and debunked mesmerism, the City of London exhibited a "curious and surprising Nymph." Said nymph had reputedly been collected from the "Gulph of Stanchio" in 1784, and later displayed at Spring Gardens, London.

Year: 1775
Originally published in: Gentleman's Magazine
Now appears in: Mermaids and Tritons in the Age of Reason by Vaughn Scribner in Public Domain Review
Two decades before it was highlighted on a King's Royal Authority broadsheet, the reputed nymph fished out of the "Gulph of Stanchio" was depicted in Gentlemen's Magazine, and from the lower torso up, was shown as an alluring figure. The written description of the mermaid explained that it bore "the features and complexion of a European. Its face is like that of a young female; its eyes a fine light blue; its nose small and handsome; its mouth small; its lips thin." To better emphasize this mermaid's European beauty, it was compared to a "hideously ugly" mermaid "with the countenance of a Negro." The alleged black mermaid was illustrated outsized ears, exaggerated lady parts just above the fish scales, and an apparent beard. Even mermaids had to be crammed into an 18th-century European-determined racial hierarchy.

Year: c. 1500 BC
Now appears in: "The Most Ancient Explorations of the Mediterranean" by Marco Masseti in Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences
This pretty little dolphin puts to shame some dolphin depictions that follow by more than 2,500 years. It appears as a decoration on a blade from the Late Helladic I period, now on display at the National Museum in Athens. This image suggests that observations of dolphins were more factual than fanciful several centuries before Homer composed his epic poems. In fact, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers likely traveled the Mediterranean Sea some 13,000 years ago, so locals had plenty of time to learn about the region's wildlife. Modern biologists suspect that this cetacean might be the striped dolphin, or Stenella ceruleoalba.

Year: 1514
Scientist/artist: Albrecht Dürer
Originally appeared in: Arion
Now appears in: Nature and Its Symbols by Lucia Impelluso, translated by Stephen Sartarelli
According to the Greek legend, the gifted singer Arion was tossed overboard by sailors who wanted to steal his stuff. By the time he was thrown into the sea, however, he had bewitched a dolphin who came to his rescue. This dolphin sports more protuberances than any seen in nature, but in fairness to Dürer, who was known for his realism, the fact that he was illustrating a legend may have given him a greater sense of artistic license.

Year: 1868
Originally published in: Harper's Weekly
Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
This "wonderful fish" described in Harper's Weekly was later identified as a basking shark, and the depiction is reasonably accurate if you ignore the legs. The shark had partially decomposed by the time it was described, and that may have lead to the assumption that it was a sea monster with legs. The colossal size is no mistake. Basking sharks are among the largest fish alive today, and can measure up to 40 feet.

Year: 1802
Scientist/artist: Pierre Denys de Montfort
Originally published in: Historie Naturalle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques
Now appears in: Sketches of Creation by Alexander Winchell and Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis
Denys de Montfort bragged that if this representation were swallowed, he would next represent a cephalopod embracing the Straits of Gibraltar. Seventy years later, Alexander Winchell did two admirable things: He called Denys de Montfort's depiction a sailor's yarn, but also suggested, "the unexplored depths of the ocean conceal the forms of octopods that far surpass in magnitude any of the species known to science." Winchell was right on both counts.
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Year: 2011
Scientists: Mark and Dianna McMenamin
Appears in: Giant Kraken Lair Discovered (http://www.eurekalert.org/ pub_releases/2011-10/ gsoa-gkl100611.php)
At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in October 2011, Mark McMenamin made an unbelievable announcement: A heap of Triassic ichthyosaur bones in Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Nevada, was the work of a 100-foot-long giant cephalopod, or kraken. The kraken killed the ichthyosaurs, carried them home, munched away their squishy parts then daintily arranged their vertebrae into a self portrait of its own suckers. While horrified fellow paleontologists realized this was not a story from The Onion, breathless journalists whose idea of journalism is repeating press releases of even the most outlandish claims without getting second opinions spread the news of the giant, sadistic, artistic kraken. Skepticism crept into news reports a day or so later, including the headline "Smokin' Kraken" and "Scientist Definitively Proves Existence of Hyper-Intelligent Mythical Octopus." Was McMenamin joking? Could he really be serious? At the GSA's previous two annual meetings, biblical literalists presented talks and led field trips. So maybe this was bound to happen.

Year: 1573-1585
Scientist: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: Similar depictions appear in Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis and On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
Called a both sea eagle and a flying fish, this was probably a "Jenny Haniver," a forgery made by mutilating a ray to resemble a winged sea monster with a human head. The trick worked, and Ambroise Paré recounted a second-hand tale of how a live specimen was presented to the lords of the city of Quioze. The origin of the name "Jenny Haniver" is unknown, but the first known illustration of one dates from the 16th century.

Year: 1854
Scientist: Japetus Steenstrup
Now appears in: The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis
In the 16th century, two naturalists, Rondelet and Pierre Belon, produced descriptions of animals they termed the Sea Monk, or monk-fish. (Historian William M. Johnson has noted that the sea monk bears a striking resemblance to Saint Francis of Assisi.) Centuries later, a very talented naturalist, Japetus Steenstrup, gave a presentation in which he compared Rondelet's illustration (on the left) and Belon's illustration (on the right) to the likeness of a squid captured in 1853. He also took into consideration a 16th-century description of the Sea Monk by Conrad Gesner. Steenstrup made an amazing deduction: "Could we, given these bits of information of how the Monk was conceived at that time, come so near to it that we could recognize to which of nature's creatures it should most probably be assigned? The Sea Monk is firstly a cephalopod."
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Year: 1642
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: Monstrorum Historia
Now appears in: Cabinets of Curiosities by Patrick Mauriès
An amazingly prolific Renaissance man, Aldrovandi sometimes exhibited what the 18th-century naturalist Buffon would later describe as "a tendency towards credulity." Of the stingray, Aldrovandi observed, "They love music, the dance and witty remarks." Exactly how stingrays exhibited their affection for these niceties is unknown.

Year: 1575
Scientist/artist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Historia Animalium
Now appears in: Shark by Dean Crawford
While Ulisse Aldrovandi devoted an entire volume to sea monsters, Conrad Gesner offered more restrained accounts, even though some of his own depictions were awfully serpent-like. This page from one of his books shows a hammerhead shark and the tooth of a white shark. In Gesner's day, sharks were commonly known as "seadogs" or "dogfish," and of the "sledgedog," he wrote, "It eats all kinds of fish, and will also swallow and tear apart swimming people. When sighted, it is considered a sign of hateful bad luck." Gesner and Aldrovandi continued a Western tradition dating back to Ancient Greece of demonizing sharks. If their legends are any indication, however, Pacific islanders — who spent much more time around the animals — respected sharks more than they loathed them, and deified some sharks. Pacific islanders told stories about shark gods somewhat similar to stories about Greek gods; the deities were fallible and complicated. But shark deities exhibited their worst behavior not as unalloyed sharks, but as shark-human hybrids.

Year: 1558
Scientist/artist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Historia Animalium
Now appears in: Shark: In Peril in the Sea by David Owen
This rendition of an angel shark is not entirely without foundation. Angel sharks have pectoral finds resembling angel wings. This image, however, shows a body resembling a tetrapod and a strangely human face.
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Year: 1569
Originally published in: The True Discripcion of this Marueilous Straunge Fishe
Now appears in: Shark: In Peril in the Sea by David Owen
This image of what was likely a thresher shark shows a fish with a tail as long as its body. After fisherman accidentally netted the animal, its skin was stuffed and displayed in London. This broadside followed, explaining that "sertayne English Fissher men" inadvertently captured the odd creature while it was "folowynge after the scooles of Mackrell" that the fishermen also sought.
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Year: 1613
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: De Piscibus
Now appears in: The Great Naturalists edited by Robert Huxley
Aldrovandi sometimes combined impressive realism (a recognizable shark) with puzzling chimera. The fish on the bottom has a mammal-like face with a saw protruding from the head, dragon-like scales, fishy fins and flippers.
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Year: 1807
Authors: Goldsmith and Mary Pilkington
Originally published in: History of the Earth and Animated Nature, Abridged
Image provided by: Biodiversity Heritage Library (some rights reserved)
Two centuries after a similar picture appeared in Aldrovandi's work, this odd sea creature appeared in an abridged version of Oliver Goldsmith's natural history, "with plates." This illustration bears a label, for the "Nar-Whale," or narwhal. Looking at this picture, you might think knowledge hadn't advanced much between Aldrovandi's and Goldsmith's lifetimes, but the most egregious errors about the narwhal were apparently confined to the plate. The 1807 edition of Goldsmith's book provided a much more accurate textual description of the narwhal, including the observation that its tusk was really a tooth.

Year: 1638
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem
Now appears in: "Ancient Scientific Basis of the 'Great Serpent' from Historical Evidence" by Richard B. Stothers in Isis June 2004 issue
For his portrayal of this beast, Aldrovandi relied on accounts from Antiquity. In the third century, the natural historian Aelian relayed the tale of the Scolopendra cetacea, a creature so fearsome that "if cast up on the shore no one would have the courage to look at it." These sea monsters, he claimed, had "numerous feet in line on either side as though they were rowing themselves." The name for this animal was derived from a common sea scolopendra, a type of centipede, but the creature Aelian described was much larger. It might have been based on observations of a real animal, such as a whale or giant squid. The feet aren't easily explained, but an animal causing ripples on the water's surface might have been assumed to have numerous feet.

Year: 1554-1555
Scientist/artist: Guillaume Rondelet
Originally published in: Libri de Piscibus Marinis
Now appears in: Matters of Exchange by Howard J. Cook
Guillaume Rondelet was one of the most highly regarded naturalists of his day, and his book on marine fishes became famous. Although ornate, this ray didn't appear to possess the same cultural graces as the one Aldrovandi described. Rondelet worked closely with local fishermen who brought him specimens, and he even built tanks and piped water into them to better observe the fish.

Century: 17th
Now appears in: The Discovery of Time edited by Stuart McCready
Taken from a 17th-century collection of fossil illustrations, this looks like a cross between a dolphin and a plant.

Year: 1734
Scientist/artist: Hans Egede
Originally published in: Full and Particular Relation of my Voyage to Greenland, as a Missionary, in the year 1734
Now appears in: Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents by Charles Gould
Egede wrote, "On the 6th of July 1734, when off the south coast of Greenland, a sea-monster appeared to us, whose head, when raised, was on level with our main-top. Its snout was long and sharp, and it blew water almost like a whale; it has large broad paws; its body was covered with scales; its skin was rough and uneven; in other respects it was as a serpent; and when it dived, its tail, which was raised in the air, appeared to be a whole ship's length from its body."

Year: 1883
Scientist: Henry Lee
Originally published in: Sea Monsters Unmasked
Now appears in: Olaus Magnus's Sea Serpent by Joseph Nigg in Public Domain Review
The sea serpent that Hans Egede thought he glimpsed made another appearance in the late 19th century, along with a possible explanation. The caption for the bottom image reads, "The animal which Egede probably saw." Sea serpent sightings persisted through the 19th century, and Lee wasn't the only one offering level-headed explanations. Antoon Cornelius Oudemans suggested that the sea monster legends could have been the outcome of sightings of marine mammals, sharks, squid or other known species. But whereas Lee suggested that the giant sea serpent described in the 16th century by Olaus Magnus was a probably big squid, Oudemans thought Olaus really intended to depict a big snake.

Year of sighting: 1872
"Witness": Captain A. Hassel
Now appears in: Mythic Creatures by Kendall, Norell and Ellis
A member of Captain Hassel's crew drew a sea serpent illustration (top) after the captain claimed to see a giant serpent with "four fins on its back" not far from his ship, off the coast of Galveston, Texas. When the eyes see something unfamiliar, the brain often fills in the details, not always accurately. Kendall, Norell and Ellis speculate that what the captain might really have seen was a line of cetaceans breaching the water surface, such as the pod of dolphins in the photograph (bottom).

Year of sighting: 1931
"Witness": Mrs. Sibyl Armstrong
Now appears in: : "Historical Anecdotes of Fishing Pressure: Misconstrued 'Sea Serpent' Sightings Provide Evidence for Antecedent Entanglement of Marine Biota in the British Isles" by Robert L. France in Fish and Fisheries
In the midst of Loch Ness Monster mania, sea serpent sightings soared, including an account from Suffolk, where a 60-foot, multi-humped creature reputedly broke the water surface. The annotations in this image explain that the animal sighted in Thorpness was the length of five rowing boats and its speed was "great." In 2020, Robert France reviewed accounts of unidentified marine objects, or UMOs. He offered a prosaic explanation: big fish, pinnipeds, and cetaceans probably got caught in fishing nets, and "so-encumbered and unfortunate animals pulling long trains of debris" were misconstrued as sea serpents. The problem of entanglement in fishing nets, France explains, was long assumed to start in the mid-20th century when plastic was widely adopted in commercial fishing, but the long list of sea serpent sightings dating back to the 19th century indicates that animals were getting caught much earlier.

Century: 10th
Scientist/artist: Richard Fournival
Originally appeared in: Bestiaire d'Amour of Richard Fournival
Now appears in: The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences by Frank Dawson Adams
Here two sailors cook their dinner on the back of a whale so big that they have mistaken it for an island and landed on it. Descriptions of island-sized whales were common in Classical times as well as the Middle Ages.

Century: 13th
Originally appeared in: Beastiary now housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford
Now appears in: Nature and Its Symbols by Lucia Impelluso and Stephen Sartarelli
One legend about whales circulated by medieval Europeans was that the cetaceans could simply open their mouths and emit a sweet fragrance (sweet to fish, anyway). The hapless fish would swim right into the trap. Never missing a moral of the story, the storytellers pointed out that faithless pleasure-seekers would be trapped by the devil in similar fashion.

Year: 1558
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
Naturalist Conrad Gesner also portrayed a whale big enough to be mistaken for an island by hapless sailors. While the sailors cook their meal over a fire on its back, this porcine cetacean messes with their ship. In all likelihood, by the time Gesner described this creature, knowledgeable Europeans no longer believed in whales of such monstrous size, although whales of monstrous appearance still appeared frequently in print.
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Year: 1621
Scientist/artist: Honorius Philoponus
Originally published in: Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis
Now appears in: The Book of Fabulous Beasts and Sea Monsters by Joseph Nigg
The whale-as-island made another appearance in this 17th-century engraving. It shows the whale, Jasconius, in an account of the voyage of Saint Brendan. Some of the monks were preoccupied with mass when the nature of the island became obvious.
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Year: 1558
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantum Natura
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
Like other whale depictions from Gesner's era, this may have been based on a glimpse of the real creature, perhaps a small cetacean.

Year: 1560
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: Nomenclator Aquatilium Animantium
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
In Gesner's time, besides the diminutive fish we know today (left), many Europeans believed in a different kind of "seahorse" (left). These pictures are obviously not on the same scale.

Year: c. 1225-1250
Originally appeared in: Ashmole Bestiary
Now appears in: Abominable Science! by Loxton and Prothero
The fish with a horse's head, the hippocamp, started out as art. Artists of the Classical world apparently thought that hippocamps looked cool pulling Poseidon's chariot. Over the centuries, these horse-fish hybrids came to be regarded as real, appearing in maps by Olaus Magnus and Abraham Ortelius among others. In the Christian moral instruction book Physiologus, the hippocamp, sometimes known as Hydrippus, symbolized Moses. Eventually it was demoted to regular sea creature, sometimes grouped with cetaceans. In this colorful medieval illumination, the hippocamp inhabits a fish-eat-fish world.

Year: c. 1250
Originally published in: Northumberland Bestiary
Image appears at: Fish and Sea Monsters Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program
These charming little animals appear in a larger illustration of marine life. The larger picture includes plenty of plausible if not recognizable fish, including a flounder and a moray eel. But this snippet of the picture shows more exotic animals. The one in the upper right corner looks like a flying fish, which is an actual thing. In the lower left and right corners are water bugs. The one on the left might be inspired by a crustacean; the one on the right looks like a colorful water beetle with a pug nose. In between them lurks a very sad-looking little fish.

Century: 13th
Originally appeared in: Bestiary (Westminster Abbey, MS 22)
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
This scaly fish bearing humanlike face with an angry expression is meant to be a dolphin. Considering dolphins turn out to be intelligent mammals, the combination of traits in this picture aren't altogether off. It's just that dolphins don't look like this.
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Year: 1658
Scientist: Conrad Gesner
Originally published in: The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents
Now appears in: Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts by Conrad Gesner
One of the beasts rumored to exist in Gesner's day was the sea wolf. According to the lore of the time, the sea wolf "liveth both on sea and land." Whether this woodcut shows the creature on sea or land is not obvious, but perhaps a wolf that could live as easily in the sea as it could on land could also walk on water. (This woodcut was published about a century after some of Gesner's other works by Edward Topsell in London.)

Year: 1861
Author: Pierre Boitard
Originally published in: Paris Before Men
Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Boitard offered his readers a first-person tour of the early Jurassic Period (then referred to as the Liassic). Accompanied by a magician who could transport him back in time, the narrator saw prehistoric monsters fleshed out and up close. The plesiosaur announced itself with a "menacing whistle," and, the narrator recounted, "I recoiled in terror on seeing the scaly head of a horrible reptile looking at me with flashing eyes. Its open mouth with sharp teeth menaced me with a forked sting; its neck was of a prodigious length, like a cable, or rather like a huge snake . . ." So the humans in this scene are just a way of telling the story. But plesiosaurs almost certainly couldn't coil their necks, snakelike, around trees. And what's it doing on land anyway?
Expanded image available

Year: c. 1475
Scientist/artist: Vincent of Beauvais
Originally published in: Mirror of History
Now appears in: Beasts: Factual and Fantastic by Elizabeth Morrison © J. Paul Getty Museum
In antiquity, the sea monster Scylla was believed to have a dozen feet and half a dozen heads — each with three rows of teeth. Here, she is simplified, looking perfectly respectable from the neck down. The sirens, in contrast, look normal from the waist up, but sport chicken legs and wings. In both cases these sea monsters touch upon the beastly nature that medieval Europeans often attributed to the fairer sex.

Year: 1491
Originally appeared in: Hortus Sanitatis
Now appears in: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer
Ostensibly depicting dolphins, this woodcut shows a pair of creatures looking very much like sirens, and particularly scary sirens at that. One wouldn't be safe to cuddle with, and the other wouldn't miss a trick.
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