Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/09/medieval-paintings-of-animals-that-look-nothing-like-real-animals-because-the-artist-had-never-seen-them.html
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Medieval artists did a lot of fanciful drawings. The pornography in marginalia, the monks with trumpets in their butts, giants fighting snails, etc etc. I always wondered whether these representations were “best guess based on hearsay” drawings or “I don’t care and am going to do something fun that could be correct.” They seemed to be having a lot of fun with it, though.
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Perfect.
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I gotta believe some of these are just artistic license… certainly there were snails in Medieval Belgium?
Or maybe it’s just some kind of ancient Pokémon?
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I love the idea of ancient scribes trying to “catch ‘em all.”
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Looks just like my little cocker spaniel… If he had a garden hose attached to his face.
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That oyster looks pissed.
(I like the composition of the tiger and crocodile drawings. Nice balance.) 
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Wasn’t the unicorn myth based on garbled descriptions of the rhinoceros?
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Yeah, you see a heck of a lot of pumas that look like deformed dogs in old Andean art, and I always figured it’s because most people got a better look at dogs than pumas. I mean, even if you see one, you’re not going to stick around to sketch it!
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Gotta sketch 'em all.
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Maybe, but nobody ever wants a rhinoceros chaser, trust me.
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There was (is?) a theory (a bit stretched, in my opinion) out there about the artists responsible for the prehistoric cave paintings in France: They had eidetic memories, i.e., given the the artworks’ no-nonsense similarity to the real things.
That theory aside, what grabbed me was how the artists, by and large, did not decide to do fanciful renditions; an artistic choice driven by [insert another theory here].
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Darwin was right.
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There’s another theory that says if the men were all out hunting for food then it was the women who did the cave paintings.
'Course, it could be that it was the women who did the hunting and old Paelo Picasso just sat on his arse mucking about with animal fat and charcoal all day…
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That pose. Looks like a Byzantine era rendition of God.
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Now that you mention it, it is, uh…Justinian so.
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