Zoology wasn’t all the time a exact science. Hundreds of 12 months in the past, individuals like Aristotle and Pliny the Elder did their greatest to compile all the pieces anybody knew about animals into large, encyclopedic tomes. However they didn’t all the time get the main points proper.
Earlier than airplanes, cameras, and Google, most individuals had by no means seen an elephant. In the event that they needed to know what an elephant seemed like, their solely possibility was to ask somebody who had—they usually just about needed to consider no matter they heard. Generally, they wrote these loopy solutions down—and for practically 2,000 years, individuals round Europe simply accepted these items as true.
10 Elephants Consistently Battle Dragons
The Greeks and the Romans had been fascinated by elephants. They’d seen them in India and Africa and had been satisfied that they had been the neatest creatures on the planet. It was an affordable perception. They’d already skilled elephants to do some unbelievable issues, from strolling on tightropes to tracing Greek letters with a brush. And so individuals had been able to consider something they learn or heard about elephants.
“When an elephant occurs to satisfy a person within the desert,” one Roman encyclopedia mentioned, “[and realizes the man is lost, then] the elephant . . . factors out the way in which.”[1] However as dependable as they had been at giving instructions, the ebook warned, it was troublesome to get an elephant on a ship. An elephant would refuse to board till someone promised that it will get dwelling safely.
The identical ebook claimed that dragons had been “perpetually at warfare with the elephant.” In India, dragons had been continually swooping down on elephants and attempting to crush them, hungering to eat their chilly blood. A very alert elephant, nonetheless, may knock a dragon down and crush it underfoot.
It’s all fairly bizarre, however it doesn’t appear to be anybody bothered to appropriate it. Over 100 years after that ebook was revealed, one other one got here out making many of the identical claims. Nevertheless it added one enjoyable additional element. This ebook mentioned that elephants reproduced by consuming a magical root that made infants spontaneously seem of their wombs.
9 Aurochs Have Projectile, Poisonous Poop
Milk cows and each form of home cattle are descended from one animal: the aurochs. The final aurochs died out about 400 years in the past. But when the Greeks and the Romans are to be believed, the world’s a much less disgusting place with out them.
In line with the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, aurochs had horns that had been bent inward. When a predator attacked them, their horns had been completely ineffective.[2] In order that they needed to depend on the one protection God gave them: operating away and pooping.
“Whereas within the act of flying,” Pliny claimed, “it sends forth its excrements.” They may shoot it out far, too—about 1.2 meters (4 ft), based on Pliny. Their projectile poop did extra than simply gross out their predators. It burned them like hearth.
Pliny’s tales concerning the weaponized poop of aurochs had been believed effectively into the Center Ages. He wasn’t the one one telling individuals it was true, although. Aristotle backed up each phrase Pliny mentioned, apart from one. About 1 meter (4 ft), he claimed, was a low estimate. Aurochs may simply poop on a goal 1.8 meters (6 ft) away.
8 Salamanders Can Put Out Fires
For a great 1,000 years or so, people as a species had been pretty positive that salamanders had been magic. They had been so chilly, Romans believed, that they might extinguish a fireplace simply by touching it.
That declare additionally got here from Pliny the Elder. However this time, he really bothered to test his info. After telling all of Rome that salamanders had magical fire-extinguishing powers, he threw a salamander into a fireplace himself. To his disappointment, the animal wasn’t magic. It was simply lifeless.
No one appears to have listened to him, although. About 1,000 years later, the Jewish rabbi Rashi was nonetheless writing about salamanders’ superb magical powers, even telling people who they might grow to be fireproof by protecting themselves with salamander blood.
He additionally insisted that salamanders had been born in fires. Particularly, he mentioned new salamander is born when a glassblower leaves his furnace ignited for seven consecutive days. After the seventh day, Rashi insisted, a new child salamander will crawl out of the fireplace.[3]
7 Eels Develop Out Of Mud
In line with historical writers, salamanders aren’t the one animals that spontaneously burst into existence. Aristotle was satisfied that lots of animals did. He tried to influence the world about a number of completely different circumstances of what he referred to as “spontaneous technology.” However the one that actually caught was his concept that eels magically develop out of mud.[4]
For greater than 2,000 years, no one even questioned Aristotle’s “eels simply magically seem” concept. Not all people agreed on the way it occurred, although. Pliny mentioned they made infants by rubbing in opposition to rocks, whereas the 17th-century English author Izaak Walton insisted that they grew out of “a specific dew falling within the months of Might and June.”
However everybody agreed on the principle element: Eels are a present from God.
It took till the 19th century earlier than anybody was capable of show that eels really reproduced. The issue was that nobody may discover their reproductive organs. Lastly, although, the world created a person who was prepared to poke round at individuals’s non-public elements lengthy sufficient to determine it out: Sigmund Freud.
That’s proper. Earlier than he turned the daddy of psychology, Freud was the person who solved the thriller of how eels get nasty.
6 Whales Have Antennae
Within the 17th century, a Frenchman named Pierre Pomet launched a ebook on the pure world that was full of illustrations of the unusual animals that inhabit our Earth. Every image was full of lovely, vivid particulars of what these unknown creatures seemed like—all drawn primarily based on what Pomet had seen when he closed his eyes and imagined actually, actually arduous.
Pomet’s whales, specifically, seemed a bit unusual. He insisted that one may inform a male whale from a feminine whale by their heads. In line with Pomet, the males had fingers with fingers, a protracted sheet of steel on their backs, and big, armored heads like the sort you’d see on a Chinese language dragon. And on high had been two lengthy antennae, every with a fluffy little pom-pom on the top.[5]
His feminine whales had been a bit nearer to actual life, however they nonetheless had antennae. Pomet insisted that these antennae had been the important thing to telling the genders aside. On the females, he claimed, the antennae had been a lot shorter and stubbier.
5 Crocodiles Are Principally Simply Monkeys
Historical civilizations had a good grasp on what crocodiles had been, however in some way, we misplaced monitor of it by medieval occasions. That turns into clear while you see the animals labeled as “crocodiles” within the E book of Flowers, an 11th-century encyclopedia, as a result of they’re just about simply monkeys.
In line with the E book of Flowers, crocodiles have lengthy, curly tails, fingers, and furry faces. It’s an odd description, and it will be straightforward to assume that they simply received the names blended up. However their imaginative and prescient of crocodiles isn’t purely monkeys. The our bodies of those creatures are lengthy, arduous, and scaly like an actual crocodile’s. They only occur to have monkey heads on high.[6]
Over the following few hundred years, our concepts about crocodiles didn’t get a lot better. Later medieval artists began getting the tails proper however saved the monkey faces. Others gave these animals large, horselike legs or made them appear like canines with scales. As no one who’d really seen a crocodile ever bothered to appropriate them, European artists saved drawing crocodiles that means till concerning the 17th century.
4 Rhinoceroses Hate Elephants
In line with Pliny the Elder, rhinoceroses and elephants completely hated one another. The second they noticed one another, Pliny the Elder claimed, they might begin brawling, duking it out in an unbelievable battle of the titans.
His tales about rhino-on-elephant violence had been so widespread that Manuel I, the 15th-century king of Portugal, determined to check them out. He had a rhinoceros and an elephant despatched to his nation and pitted them in a battle royal.
It didn’t fairly go as deliberate. Because it turned out, elephants are lovers and never fighters.[7] As quickly because the elephant noticed the rhinoceros, the elephant simply ran for its life.
Even so, Manuel’s experiment didn’t result in a greater understanding of animals. As a substitute, tales about his rhinoceros unfold round Europe, getting crazier each time somebody informed it.
A German woodworker named Albrecht Durer turned so enthralled by the tales that he sat down and drew an image primarily based on what he’d heard. His rhinoceros had scaly legs and arduous, armor-like plates on its again. Durer left notes saying that the rhinoceros is “the colour of a speckled tortoise [and is] lined with thick scales.”
3 Bees Can Be Killed By A Menstruating Lady’s Stare
Pliny the Elder wasn’t simply confused about animals. He had unusual concepts about ladies, too. He particularly couldn’t perceive menstruation, besides that it was one thing that should be feared. The stare of a menstruating girl, he insisted, may kill. “A swarm of bees, if seemed upon by her,” he warned, “will die instantly.”[8]
As a lot as historical bees needed to wrestle by way of the peril of girls on their durations, although, that they had an incredible superpower. Useless bees, Pliny insisted, might be introduced again to life by protecting them with mud and the physique of an ox or a bull.
Later generations of writers didn’t absolutely agree with Pliny that bees might be introduced again to life. However they had been pretty positive he was onto one thing about that bull factor. Saint Augustine and Isidore of Seville had been positive that bees had been incapable of getting intercourse. As a substitute, they believed that bees spontaneously generated out of the rotting flesh of cows.
2 Vipers Eat Every Different When They Reproduce
In line with the Greeks and the Romans, having infants was a horrible expertise for vipers. However that they had no alternative: In the event that they had been going to breed, each viper dad and mom needed to die.
When two vipers reproduced, the Greeks and Romans claimed, the male would stick his head into the feminine’s mouth and spit semen at her. The feminine would get so excited by this that she would chunk down and chomp the male’s head off.
However her time was coming, too. She would quickly begin rising as much as 20 kids inside her womb, and they might be so excited to get out that they might eat their means by way of her stomach.[9]
It was a bizarre story, however it turned even stranger over time. By the third century AD, Roman writers weren’t solely telling people who vipers had these brutal mating rituals, the writers had been additionally saying that vipers seemed like human beings. “The male viper resembles a person,” a ebook referred to as the Physiologus mentioned, “and the feminine resembles a lady to the waist, however under the waist she has a crocodile’s tail.”
1 Pelican Blood Can Convey The Useless Again To Life
Within the seventh century, a author referred to as Isidore of Seville made an odd declare about pelicans: These birds have magical blood that may resurrect the lifeless.
He claimed that being resurrected from the lifeless was a ceremony of passage for pelicans. When a younger pelican matured, it will be murdered by its mom. The mom would mourn its kids’s deaths for 3 days after which begin pecking at its personal chest till it bled. Because the blood fell on the mom’s lifeless kids, the pelicans would come again to life.[10]
Isidore didn’t appear absolutely satisfied by his personal story, and it most likely ought to have been handed off as a legend. However as an alternative, everybody accepted it because the gospel reality. By the 13th century, a number of books backed up his story as scientific truth.
By the 16th century, a pelican stabbing itself was the official image of Queen Elizabeth. It was even on the quilt of the primary version of the King James Bible.
Mark Oliver is a daily contributor to Listverse. His writing additionally seems on numerous different websites, together with The Onion’s StarWipe and Cracked.com. His web site is repeatedly up to date with all the pieces he writes.
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