STRANGE SCIENCE'S ILLUSTRATED STORY OF STRANGE SEA CREATURES by EARLY OCEAN EXPLORERS

STRANGE SCIENCE : SEA MONSTERS : Pics and Stories link here

This is an interesting article full of pictures from the 1400's and forward. Some of the strange creatures that were drawn and written about.

One of the illustrations.  Called MonkFish... Looks to me like someone tried to put people clothes on the fish.  Year: 1854 by Scientist: Japetus Steenstrup, this illustration now appears in: The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis

Excerpt: 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."