The American Museum of Natural History in New York has opened an exhibition "Fictional Creatures", which tells about dragons, unicorns, mermaids and other animals inhabiting fairy tales and myths.
Since the museum is a natural science museum, and the curators are paleontologists and anthropologists, the world of mythological creatures, dragons, mermaids, giant octopuses and birds Roc and Phoenix is analyzed from modern scientific positions. No, the point is not that a huge exposition with facts proves that all these creatures do not exist - they are simply all divided into species and subspecies, described how they look, what they eat and where they can be caught. Of course, some fictions crumble by themselves - paleontologists explain that fossil bones of dinosaurs were taken for the remains of dragons, and anthropologists - that the legend of an undying bird could not but be born, because dreams of flight and immortality are characteristic of all people on earth. And yet it turns out that not all the riddles have been solved, and the facts are sometimes more surprising than myth.
Three sections of the exhibition - creatures-creatures of water, earth and air.
In the first hall there are giant tentacles of a huge octopus, or kraken. The entire modern world is well aware of the habits of this creature - thanks to Hollywood. This creature is shown in full detail in the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean". But this is not the crowning glory of the kraken - five hundred years ago, and without any cinema, people knew much more about him. Still, many sailors talked about how their ships were attacked by an unknown monster the size of a small island that appeared from the depths. There was so much of this evidence that the naturalist Karl Linnaeus, who laid the foundations for the scientific classification of animals in the 18th century, had to include the kraken in the cephalopod section and give it a Latin name. And just two centuries ago, the French zoologist Pierre de Montfort even suggested distinguishing between two species of a huge mollusk - from the northern and southern seas. Jules Verne,who prided himself on not sinning against the truth in his novels, such a beast is trying to attack Captain Nemo's submarine. And this summer, scientists managed to photograph a grandiose squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) in the sea, the length of which is close to 9 meters …
There are also sea snakes that swallow ships (the American curators, unfortunately, do not know the Russian folk tale about the miracle-yudo-fish-whale, this would diversify the visual range even more). And in the case of the snake, the scientific explanation of the myth seems more unrealistic than the myth itself. Scientists consider the herring king to be the prototype of the fabulous sea snake. The herring king (Regalecus) is a rare semi-deep sea fish that is sometimes caught with shoals of herring. Her narrow body reaches a length of 9 meters, and on her head she has a fin in the form of a red crown - you can't imagine this on purpose. Or here's another mermaid. Suppose the fact that it is found in the legends of all European peoples can be attributed to the Greeks. But the cult of mermaids also exists among the primitive tribes living on the coast of Africa. They certainly did not read Homer. And in the XVII-XIX centuries, Indian craftsmen traded by selling small dried up mermaids to European travelers. There is even one such at the exhibition - it turned out, however, that the mummy was skillfully made from a monkey, the tail of a large fish and papier-mâché.
The mermaid is an amphibian creature. Like the Japanese kappa, it is a water imp that looks like a monkey with fish scales instead of fur, and has a hole on its head in which it carries water. Kappa feeds on human blood, but coping with it easily - you need to either give him a cucumber as a ransom (the kappa loves him terribly), or make him bow down - the water will pour out and the demon will lose its magical power.
The creatures spawned by the earth are even more diverse. It's not even interesting to talk about unicorns and winged horses - all the features of their biology are taught in the classroom at Hogwarts school. A rich dossier is collected in this section on Bigfoot - here are the footage of the famous film, in 1967, which captured the walking yeti, and the prints of his paws. By the way, in the Russian forests there was also a similar evil spirits - the writer Ivan Turgenev told about his meeting with a terrible creature, the "snow woman" (recorded by Guy Maupassant, who heard the story in the form of the novel "Horror"). Moreover, not all such terrifying creatures were "born" long ago - for example, the Chupacabra appeared quite recently. This medium-sized animal, which walks on its hind legs and sucks blood from goats, has been seen in Mexico since 1994, and so far nothing but photographs of dried carcasses of a predator,scientists do not have it.
The air of fairy tales is inhabited by giant birds. There is also the Rukh bird, a huge, eagle-like, with a wingspan of 30 steps, which is described in Arab tales about Sinbad the Sailor (eats elephants). And the European bird Phoenix - the ancient Roman scientist Pliny describes the capture of one such. One of the early church fathers, Clement of Alexandria, gives the exact details: Phoenix lives for five hundred years, and when his time comes to die, he builds himself a nest of myrrh and other fragrant materials, sits in it and dies. But as a result of its decomposition, a worm is obtained, which, being fed with the juice of a dead bird, becomes overgrown with feathers.
Dragons had to allocate a separate room - so many varieties of them are known. Dragons are almost an indispensable element of any fairy tale or fantasy; therefore, in order not to fall into platitudes, the curators mainly focused on eastern dragons. Fortunately, their iconography is very rich - there is Indian sculpture, and Japanese netsuke, and Chinese carnival costumes. Scientists have lowered the dragon from heaven to earth - they believe that such a large and obviously heavy lizard could not fly. True, there is one theory - it seems that the dragons had such a bubble inside, like a fish bubble, and the dragon could fill it (unappetizing detail) with gases from the stomach. This is how additional lifting force appeared; this also explains the dragon's ability to puff with fire. So far, no one has refuted this theory.
