These days, cryptozoology is best known as a reality television subject only marginally more reputable than TLC’s latest incestuous hilljack clan. It wasn’t always this way, however. Only a few centuries ago, many of zoology’s leading lights fully believed in the possibility of fantastic monsters lurking in the darkest corners of the world.
Of course, the world had a lot more dark corners in those days, at least in the minds of European scientists and explorers. The creatures you see here were once considered to be real by prominent members of the scientific establishment. As you’ll see, some turned out to be real — albeit radically different than imagined — while others were pure fantasy.
Rhinoceros
“But wait,” you say in alarm. “Everyone knows that rhinoceroses exist.” Listen, shut the fuck up. Rhinoceroses were well-known in Europe in Roman times, when they were shipped into Italy to battle in the arena. This specimen, which Dürer never saw firsthand (obviously) was the first one in Europe in a thousand years. If someone started whispering about a giant horned beast that hadn’t been seen in ten centuries, how quickly do you think the History Channel would have a camera crew out there?
What’s fascinating to me is how relatively close Dürer got to a real rhino. The general shape is there, but he interpreted the pachyderm’s thick hide as literal plate armor, complete with rivets. My favorite detail is the tiny little unicorn horn between his shoulder blades. Brother looks like a regular rhinoceros reached its ultimate form.
“Rhinomon, digivolve to … SamuraiRhinomon!”
The Kraken
In the earliest versions of the legend, the Kraken wasn’t any kind of squid at all. It was the Norse version of that old sailor’s tale about an island that turns out to be a sleeping monster. You know, the sailors come ashore and start a fire to cook their dinner, and they’re killed when the beast wakes up and dives beneath the waves. The Scandinavian version was supposed to have antennae, which later writers interpreted as tentacles, and the Kraken became forever associated with cephalopods.
French malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort was super devoted to the idea that colossal cephalopods not only existed, but habitually attacked and sunk sailing ships on the open sea. He created the image above to illustrate a supposed attack by such a creature, and man, I saw that drawing two decades ago and I have never forgotten it. There’s just something about the way the tentacles lace through the rigging, and the unholy size of the great, staring eyes. I’ve literally got a version of it tattooed on my body.
And here’s the amazing thing: there is real, physical evidence for colossal cephalopods. In 2007, a squid was caught off the coast of New Zealand which was 15′ long and weighed in at more than a thousand pounds. It remains the largest intact cephalopod ever recorded, but its beak was much smaller than some found undigested in the stomachs of whales. In other words, squid several times larger than the current record-holder are almost certainly lurking in the darkest depths of the ocean.
The Gloucester Sea Serpent
Most cultures have some form of great serpent or dragon that lives far beneath the waves in a primordial sort of Deep. You know, like Godzilla. As Western science continued to delve deeper into nature’s mysteries, it didn’t seem unlikely that they would eventually confront the reality of the great sea serpent. For decades, in fact, both scientists and laypeople firmly believed that such creatures existed, but only surfaced very rarely.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that people saw them. Most sightings occurred aboard ships (most famously the HMS Daedalus), but the most spectacular serpent sighting occurred in the harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1817. Hundreds of people simultaneously observed a titanic shape in the water, 70 feet long and as thick as a barrel.
Despite the scale, that’s a pretty tame serpent, but the newspapers fixed that, running the story with that glorious image up there. First, they scaled it up to kaiju size, and then literally scaled it up with jagged, Leviathanian skin.
The Unicorn
Nowadays, the unicorn is kind of the postercreature for cryptids that just absolutely don’t exist. Even those who hold out hope that Nessie will waddle ashore and start reciting an oral history of her people are willing to write off the unicorn as pure fantasy. Once upon a time, though, the unicorn was as plausible as any of them.
For one thing, the unicorn is 99% horse, and none of its parts are antithetical to ungulates; it’s not like it’s got a fish tail or bat wings, you know? The Greeks believed that unicorns lived in Asia or Africa, both of which have rhinoceroses and staggering varieties of antelope, so there’s nothing particularly outlandish about a thing that’s mostly horsey with a single spiral horn.
If you’re wondering why the horn on that unicorn is so fargin huge, there’s a reason for it, and it’s also tied up in why folks figured the beast had to be out there somewhere. Medieval scholars had this idea that all land creatures had an undersea equivalent, and narwhals were at least somewhat well-known. Narwhals have huge, spiral tusks, some of which were sold to unwary collectors as genuine unicorn parts. Now you’ll never lose any more sleep over why medieval and early modern scientists imagined a goat-to-horse-sized beast hauling around a whale-sized horn.
Megalosaurus
We here at Dirge love our dinosaurs, preferably as grotesque and unrealistic as possible. If you enjoyed our roundup of gory-ass dinosaur trading cards, here’s their grandpa: the first attempted reconstruction of a prehistoric reptile.
Megalosaurus fossils were first unearthed in England in the 17th century, and they were initially assumed to be either the remains of Roman war elephants or the bones of the humanoid giants described in The Bible. The bone in question, the bottom part of the femur, was referred to in the nascent scientific literature as scrotum humanum, or, in plain English, “a guy’s balls.”
It wasn’t until 1824 that English polymath Gideon Mantell realized that the “scrotum” and other similar fossils came from Mesozoic strata and likely represented a completely undiscovered form of prehistoric life. In 1827, scrotum humanum officially became Megalosaurus (“great lizard”).
About a decade later, Sir Richard Owen — the guy who coined the word “dinosaur” — attempted a reconstruction of Megalosaurus and another dinosaur called Iguanodon, based on crocodiles, the largest reptiles still extant. His very basic version was expanded upon by countless other paleoartists, and the result was this incredibly evocative (and stupendously incorrect) vision of dinosaurs as antediluvian monsters, akin to the biblical Leviathan or Behemoth.
The Wild Man
There’s a whole book in this somewhere (and I’m going to to write it eventually), but the short version is this: humans desperately want there to be a version of themselves living on the periphery of civilization. It’s a deep-down, inbuilt desire; the ancient Sumerians gave us Gilgamesh’s departed bro Enkidu. Today, it manifests as a continued belief in Bigfoot in the age of Google Earth, but in the Middle Ages they had the wild man.
They were stock characters in myth and folklore. Sir Lancelot lost his shit and became a wild man during one of his more operatic outpourings of unrequited love for Queen Guinevere. In the Grimm fable Iron Hans, a cursed king takes the form of a wild man to aid a worthy young man. They were also popular costumes, worn during festivals and parades.
Here, the wild man is shown in his trademark animal skins, with an utterly ungovernable beard and a wooden club as a weapon. Today, we’d think of those as archetypal traits of the caveman, but that’s kind of what the wild man was supposed to be: a primitive almost-us just on the other side of civilization, albeit geographically rather than temporally.
Despite this, medieval bestiaries often listed them among real animals, perhaps bolstered by rumors of great apes in Africa and Asia (riding around on unicornback, no doubt). Let’s not forget that if you were homeless or mentally ill in the Middle Ages, you’d probably wind up eking out an existence on the periphery of civilization, perhaps simultaneously inspiring and inspired by the myth.
