Posts tagged freaks of nature
herrndelacepedes05lac_0249 by The Ernst Mayr Library on Flickr.
Herrn de la Cepede’s Naturgeschichte der Amphibien, oder der enerlegenden vierfussigen Thiere und der Schlangen : Eine Fortsetzung von Buffon’s Naturgeschichte / Aus dem französischen übersetzt … von Johann Matthäus Bechstein. Bd. 1-5.
Weimar: Verlage des Industrie = Comptoir’s, 1800-1802.
did you know:
during the Middle Ages traveling was very laborious and thus, not many people ever got to see other countries, let alone continents. Instead, they imagined what humans in faraway places might look like (exaggerated reports from travellers probably helped)
This picture by Sebastian Münster shows a member of the Blemmyes tribe, some people believed they were also cannibals, Shakespeare writes about them in Othello: And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.
Extremely weird, but kinda cool at the same time.
Illustration of dissection of conjoined twins from the 1665 edition of De Monstris by Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657).
Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. Via. Wikipedia
cupid/chiron the archers
(Source: chernikhov)
The leucrota is a swift beast that lives in India. It is a composite animal, the result of a mating between a hyena and a lioness. It has an extremely wide mouth, that stretches from one ear to the other. It does not have individual teeth, but only a single bone where teeth should be.
