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Aaahh!!! Fake Monsters

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In 1897, the Japanese naturalist Minakata Kumagusu, trying to nail down the boundary between myth and reality, asked the journal Nature for more information about something called a “centipede-whale.”1

Scolopendra cetacea or “centipede-whale” illustrated by Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in the 16th century. Public domain via New York Public Library Digital Collections.

“I am very much desirous of being informed by you, or some of your readers, what animal is meant by “Scolopendra Cetacea,” he wrote. The most detailed reference he could find was nearly two thousand years old, in Aelian’s De Natura Animalium.2 In Aelian’s telling, the beastly fish was about the size of a trireme (a many-oared Mediterranean warship), with countless feet on each side. The creature surfaced again and again throughout history, in Japanese and Chinese texts,  and in lush tomes by Renaissance naturalists such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, Guillaume Rondelet and Conrad Gessner.3 Was it some kind of exaggerated cuttlefish?4

That Kumagusu was having so much trouble sorting truth from fiction even at the turn of the twentieth century was a testament to how much remained mysterious in the animal kingdom. Apocryphal monsters that had been first described by Pliny the Elder were still being reported after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and scientists were now giving them Latin binomial names.5 Even as the catalog of life on earth grew at an incredible pace, it continued to incorporate secondhand accounts gathered by ancient scholars and embellished over centuries, accounts that suggested a world teeming with fantastic beasts and half-human, half-animal chimeras.

But nothing beats flesh and blood, and before photographs, naturalists often relied on taxidermy—the prepared and mounted skins of animals—to validate species and illustrate field guides. Taxidermy has enjoyed periods of immense public popularity, and in the nineteenth century it drew crowds in London and New York. For millions of people, improbable-seeming animals like the rhinoceros and giraffe moved from anecdote to specimen, becoming what historian Karen R. Jones calls “the engineered beasts of the great indoors.”6 Some of these fantastic creatures, though, slipped a little too easily from the medieval bestiary into the tangible world, and were not what they seemed.

The most well-documented of these creatures might be the “Feejee mermaid” (sometimes spelled “Fiji mermaid”) originally an animal hoax from Edo period Japan (1600-1868), in which the body of a petrified fish was fused with the head and torso of a monkey.7 This dried-out chimera traveled first to England, where it quickly wore out its welcome, and, once debunked in Europe, found its way into the cunning hands of P.T. Barnum. In New York in 1842, Barnum invented an elaborate provenance for the “mermaid,” which included not only a fake “Lyceum of Natural History” but also an impersonator hired to play a fake naturalist. Using this lurid public relations campaign, Barnum tripled ticket sales to his American museum.8 When public skepticism boiled over, he embraced the controversy to make even more money.9 In his letters he wrote that clever taxidermy was key to his win-win strategy: “If it is artificial the senses of sight and touch are ineffectual — if it is natural then all concur in declaring it the greatest Curiosity in the World.”10

A real Jenny Haniver or ‘Sea-Devil’ from a museum in Iran next to an illustration of Rhinobatos lentiginosus, one of many species of rays suitable for making this hoax. First image: Freshman404, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Plate 17, Samuel Garman, The Plagiostomia : Sharks, skates, and rays, 1913, public domain via Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Less obviously fabricated, but certainly more widespread, were “Jenny Hanivers,” which were pegged as fakes as early as the sixteenth century but still found for sale in curio shops in the 1970s.11 Made from the mangled, manicured carcass of a ray or a skate, whose bottom facing mouths and gills resemble ghoulish faces, they were presented as anything from a basilisk to a humanoid “sea-bishop.”12 Even before trickery, early illustrations of these species resemble the xenomorph monster from Alien. From this Chondrichthyan (a class of fish) baseline, entrepreneurs of all stripes carved and twisted “sea devils” to suit their fancy.

Distinguishing between monsters and the real products of evolution is only easy in retrospect, especially when you consider the distorted visage of something like a ray, not to mention the fantastic proportions of other rare sea creatures like basking sharks and giant squid.13 Many creatures, real and fake, have spent time in the margins between science and myth, and taxidermy, despite feeling very “real,” could perpetuate these marginal creatures.14

Consider a few different taxidermied “dragons” and “serpents.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many stuffed dragons turned out to be taxidermic composites made of snakes, rabbits, weasels, and flying fish.15 The skeleton of one especially elaborate specimen, Cornelius Meyer’s dragon, was displayed in Rome in the 1690s. Meyer, a civil engineer, likely produced the skeleton to quell local rumors that a live dragon was still at large in the countryside, and in so doing, to keep his construction project on track. Although the specimen itself is gone, Meyer’s detailed illustration of it remains, and it became the subject of debate in the twenty-first century when it was discovered by young-earth creationists, who believed it was a pterosaur. The illustration was scientifically accurate enough for zoologists at Fayetteville State University to settle the debate by analyzing it bone-by-bone. They found that Meyer had stitched his “dragon” together thus: “The skull…is that of a domestic dog. The mandible is that of a second, smaller domestic dog. The ‘hindlimb’ is the forelimb of a bear. The ribs are from a large fish. Ostensible skin hides the junctions between the parts of different animals. The tail is a sculpted fake.”16

In the nineteenth century, another sensational specimen was stuffed and exhibited in London. In this case, the twelve-foot long creature was real—a rare giant oarfish—and had been caught by fishermen in North East England. It was advertised as both a “sea-serpent” and a fish new to science; in other words, a real species presented in a P.T. Barnum way. The specimen itself must have seemed lackluster, since it was displayed alongside a more exciting oil painting of the oarfish alive in its natural habitat.17 In the faunal frenzy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even serious naturalists competed with fabulists like Barnum for the attention of the public.

The Victorian-era poster for an oarfish advertised as a sea-serpent in 1849 next to a more accurate illustration of the fish by French naturalist Georges Cuvier in his Le règne animal distribué d’après son organisation. First image: Public domain, via the Wellcome Collection. Second image: Georges Cuvier,  CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In his 1894 short story “Triumphs of a Taxidermist,” H.G. Wells satirized these incentives toward exaggeration and fakery, when a drunk taxidermist confides to the narrator about fabricating extinct birds. “We make ’em of grebes’ feathers and the like,” he says. For centuries, the ever-expanding colonial frontier had brought rumors and disjointed body parts of birds like the dodo and the moa, fueling wild imaginations and frenzy among collectors. Wells’ taxidermist goes on to brag about inventing whole new species: “I have created birds. New birds. Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen before.”18

As Wells’ story suggests, there was often a slyness to this elaborate fakery, and even a knowing wink toward the audience. Sometimes the question of authenticity was half the fun, like with the “Coleman Frog,” a monstrous forty-two pound amphibian, supposedly stuffed in the nineteenth century, that was displayed with a no-questions-asked policy at the Fredericton Regional Museum in Canada in the 1950s.19 Hunting-lodge cryptids, like the Jackalope, the Wolpertinger, and the Rasselbock (to most observers rabbits with antlers) are like this too, taxidermy jokes that have now become folklore. Although even these may have originated in a real phenomenon: rabbits get a papilloma virus that causes horn-like protrusions.20

Today, we have fewer places for cryptids to hide, and many new tools to determine their authenticity.21 For each new generation of naturalists, these mysteries become easier to resolve. The margins of the map recede a bit, and there are camera traps, iNaturalist sightings, and DNA barcodes to parse whichever new species dare to surface. But we are still living alongside dead, stuffed creatures from the past, and the illusions they might contain. The dodo at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology is made of chicken and duck feathers.22 In a sense, it is a hoax—a chimera, made from other species, meant to trick us into believing it is the real thing.

And taxidermy continues to bring marginal creatures to life through illusion. Modern taxidermy competitions often have a category for “re-creations,” mounted specimens made from pieces of other animals. One world-renowned taxidermist, Ken Walker, has produced—in addition to traditional mounts of extant species like wolves, alligators, and wallabies—award-winning chimeras in the form of a pleistocene Irish Elk, made from three regular elk, and what he says is a true-to-life bigfoot, made from the hides of highland cattle.23

Now that the taxonomy of life is more settled, at least for the vertebrates on the planet right now, it’s become clear that we have no shortage of fantastic, sometimes monstrous creatures; and that taxidermy is just one way we try to pin down our oblique understanding of the wild, exuberant life beyond our knowledge.

  1. Minakata Kumagusu, “The Centipede-Whale,” Nature 56 (1897): 445; Minakata Kumagusu, “The Centipede-Whale,” Nature 58 (1898): 570-571.
  2. Claudius Aelianus, De Natura Animalium, translation A.F. Scholfield (Harvard University Press, 1958).
  3. See Conrad Gessner, Icones animalium quadrupedum uiuiparorum et ouiparorum (Excudebat C. Froschouerus, 1560); Ulisse Aldrovandi, Vlyssis Aldrovandi patricii Bononiensis Monstrorum historia: Cum paralipomenis historiae omnium animalium (Typis Nicolai Tebaldini, 1642); and Guillaume Rondelet, Libri de piscibus marinis in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt (Matthias Bonhomme, 1554).
  4. The best guess seems to be some kind of conflation of a giant cuttlefish (which is only about a meter long), squid, or annelid worm with a whale.
  5. Pliny, Natural History, translation H. Rackham (Harvard University Press, 1938); See also Scoliopus atlanticus, the name given by the Linnaen society to a sea serpent thought to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the early 19th century.
  6. Karen R. Jones, “Fantastic Beasts in The Great Indoors: Taxidermy, Animal Capital and the Domestic Interior in Britain, 1851–1921,” Home Cultures 18, no. 2 (2021): 151-171.
  7. Mōri Baien, Baien gyofu [“Baien Book of Fish”] (Publisher unknown, 1835).
  8. There was a fake museum in London that Barnum invented as part of the mermaid’s backstory, and then there was Barnum’s real museum in New York City, which was tacky and sensational but no more “fake” than the other dime museums of the era.
  9. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Little, Brown, 1973).
  10. P.T. Barnum to Moses Kimball, Letter 5, September 4, 1843, Boston Athenaeum (accessed through Disability History Museum).
  11. W. M. S. Russell and F. S. Russell, “The Origin of the Sea Bishop,” Folklore 86, no. 2 (1975): 94-98.
  12. Russell and Russell, “The Origin of the Sea Bishop, 94-98.
  13. Oarfish are a common suspect for historical accounts of sea serpents, as are basking sharks, and some contemporary biologists have attempted to quantify how many historical accounts correspond with each species. See Gene S. Helfman “Secrets of a Sea Serpent Revealed,” Environmental Biology of Fishes 98 (2015): 1723–26, and A.C. Oudemans, The Great Sea-Serpent (Luzac & Co, 1892).
  14. Some creatures still dwell in this grey area, such as the Kting Voar. A few elaborate horns led serious biologists to describe a new species of wild bovine in Southeast Asia, but the horns seem likely to have been carefully carved from domestic cattle. See John H. Brandt et al., “Debate on the authenticity of Pseudonovibos spiralis as a new species of wild bovid from Vietnam and Cambodia,” Journal of the Zoological Society of London 255 (2001): 437-444.
  15. Phil Senter and Darius M. Klein, “Investigation of claims of late-surviving pterosaurs: the cases of Belon’s, Aldrovandi’s, and Cardinal Barberini’s winged dragons,” Palaeontologia Electronica 17, no. 3 (2014).
  16. Phil Senter and Pondanesa D. Wilkins, “Investigation of a claim of a late-surviving pterosaur and exposure of a taxidemic hoax: the case of Cornelius Meyer’s dragon,” Palaeontologia Electronica 16, no. 1 (2013).
  17. Albany Hancock & Dennis Emblet, “Account of a Ribbon Fish (Gymnetrus) taken off the coast of Northumberland,” The Annals and Magazine of Natural History Vol. 4, series 2, 4, no. 19 (1849): 1-18.
  18. H.G. Wells, The Stolen Bacillus And Other Incidents (Methuen & Co, 1895).
  19. Charles Mandel, “Story of the big frog is no bull, museum says” Regina Leader-Post, July 28, 2007.
  20. Richard E. Shope, “Infectious Papillomatosis of Rabbits,” Department of Animal and Plant Pathology of The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Princeton, N. Y. (1933).
  21. Although these too can be fallible. In the early 20th century, many leading taxidermists looked to photography as a uniquely infallible medium for depicting ‘real’ nature—and yet photography has gone on to perpetuate its own enduring set of famous cryptid hoaxes.
  22. Elizabeth Andres, ANIMALS, ARTISTS AND AUTHENTICITY: Exploring the Spectrum of Museum Taxidermy (University of Leicester, 2020).
  23. “International Awards,” First Class Trophy, accessed December 5, 2025; Big Fur, directed by Dan Wayne (Wedge Films, 2019).
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Sam Moore is a writer, filmmaker, and producer at Threshold Podcast. He holds an MS in Environmental Studies with a focus on Environmental History from the University of Oregon.

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