Sea Monsters as depicted in years gone by

I just found this great page which is a list of sea monsters and some brief info about them. Not much to write as have not looked at full page yet but looks cool...
www.strangescience.net...

reply to post by and14263


Interesting. I love hippocampus, definitely my favorite mythological beast.

It's funny how they eventually pretty well became depicted as either dinosaur-looking creatures, or things we recognize now as real sea animals.

We did have some raging imaginations back then!

[edit on 12-6-2009 by Heatburger]

That always made me wonder....

We look at old sea monster pictures and 99% of the time they resemble something we know. There are tons of examples of sea snakes in this form. Where did those come from? Is it possible it is a true living legend like the giant squid? Sure we had wild imaginations but so does nature.

reply to post by DaMod


Oh yeah I can completely agree with that. It's completely possible some of these things exist in some way shape or form somwhere. We know surprisingly little about the ocean deep. God knows what could be down there.

Most of those illustrations do coincide with modern day marine biology findings. As for the ones that don't, who knows? One could come strutting up to surface like Coelacanth and we'll have a new species labelled.

I'm surprised this thread hasn't seen more attention; I was going over the OP's link the other night and thought it was great. I guess most crypto-lovers would rather talk about the moster of the week instead of the legends which are most likely to be true.

I found it funny, when going through those pics, that the walrus was drawn in such a way; it occured to me that the artist probably didn't believe in walruses. Who would? Only a bunch of crazy sailors from the north had ever seen them. It was probably a few hundred years until the existence of the walrus was proven in the minds of most scientists. And don't even get me started about the giant squid; I remember having arguments with a biology teacher about that one. A part of me still wishes I were in high school so I could laugh at her.

The point is that we don't know half of what we know. We are a race of imaginative doubters, and that won't change until reality bites us in the butt; in this case, literally.

How very cool. I have always had a thing for old maps and the window to the old world that they often offer up.

This is some really fascinating stuff to look at. It is really neat to see how pople often interpretid what we now know to be something completly different or not even real at all.

There were several creatures that made me think of plain old whales. I imagine that after years of sharing the story of these giant creatures, the story got altered as it was passed down, and from that came the legends of these terrible sea creatures and peoples adventures in fighting them off.

Thanks for sharing!

Glad it has been appreciated
It's interesting to think how people came up with some of them. As said, an over embellished whale story can account for some but I wonder which madman thought of the Hydra, I guess like much Greek mythology it is a bit weird...

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.

16th monster down

I found the Monk fish amusing. Can you imagine seeing a robed aquatic monk jumping about the water? Talk about exercising one's fears; some of the old myths are simply funny.
Imagine living in fear of a sea creature which leaps up from the depths to preach to you; though I know that isn't what the legend itself stated, I find the concept infinitely humorous.

Originally posted by DaMod
That always made me wonder....

We look at old sea monster pictures and 99% of the time they resemble something we know. There are tons of examples of sea snakes in this form. Where did those come from? Is it possible it is a true living legend like the giant squid? Sure we had wild imaginations but so does nature.

There was a great programme on recently about mythological creatures. It discussed many of the ones we talk about, sea monsters, unicorns, dragons, the pheonix etc.

It said that most tales of monsters were simply explorers seeing an unknown creature, and often "expanding" upon the truth a little when they returned.

For example, the first people to visit the Komodo islands probably saw a Komodo Dragon, probably got too close and some people were eaten by them....then went home with great stories about huge man-eating lizards. This is probably where the dragon myth comes from.

The pheonix was linked to a modern day bird that buries it's eggs in volcanic hot ash if i remember correctly.

As for sea monster, just look at some of the giant squid caught in recent years, can't blame a man for freaking at that if you saw it for the first time.

CX.

[edit on 17/6/09 by CX]