Physical Curiosities

Physica Curiosa was a reference book of bizarre animals and nightmarish humanoid creatures that, in 1662, were thought to be living out there somewhere in the world. Not too nearby luckily. Its creator was a priest called Gaspar Schott. It is believed that he did not do much fieldwork but relied on the reports of other people.


Left: "Monstrum biceps cum altero capite in ventre,” two-headed monster with another head in its belly. Right: "Monstrum septiceps,” seven headed monster.

The original book is in University of Iowa’s digital collection. You can look at it at this link. I first read about Gaspar Schott’s monster collection at the brilliant blog Res Obscura.

Monster Minds

Hello to all the kids of Belfast’s Lower Ormeau who I meet with recently. They were all taken out for the morning to Queen’s University and shown around its hallowed corridors. It’s just like Hogwarts, was the general consensus. In the university’s Great Hall I gave them a presentation on … what else? Monsters.


Thanks to Paul Maddern for this photograph and the next two below. This is me, being asked a tough question.

In the week leading up to their visit two staff members had been leading creative writing and drawing classes with them. The theme was monsters and they created whole books of brilliant drawings. It was great to see them.


One example from the student’s own monster book.


Another example. A monster with a pet monster. What a good idea! I may have to steal it. It is a quick, scrawled, drawing but I think that makes the creatures seem even scarier. Maybe the kid who drew was so frightened by their own creation that they just couldn’t colour it.

On the internet, an artist called Dave Devries has started a website called Monster Engine. The galleries there began with this one simple question. “What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically?” Below are some results.


Boo! Example one.


Another strange beast.


A dangerous ninja, with what looks like a vicious side-kick in a box. Or is she a prisoner?


Dave Devries's version. Not a prisoner, she kicks her way out.

Click here to visit Monster Engine.

A Monster Calls

Siobhan Dowd only started writing books towards the end of her life. A Swift Pure Cry came out in 2006. It’s a compassionate story of teen pregnancy. The London Eye Mystery was a hit of 2007. She died of cancer in that same year with two more novels written and the beginnings of a third. Bog Child, which is my favourite, won the Carnegie Medal. Solace of the Road came out in 2009.

The notes for the third were handed over to Patrick Ness. He was given the job of forming a story from them. The book he has written will be out next year. I like the title, a lot.



Siobhan Dowd’s battle with cancer seems to have arisen in the story of A Monster Calls. From the blurb:

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming... The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild.

Patrick Ness has been getting loads of fans for his Chaos Walking trilogy. Read his hard-driven, violent, stories and Ness might seem a strange choice to handle any project begun by the more restrained, contemplative, Dowd. But then, wonderful things can result when contrasting favours are mixed.

Lost Dogs Let Loose

I should be working on Deep Deep Down but instead I spent the day making fliers for the launch of Lost Dogs this weekend. If you happen to be in Belfast please join us in No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, on Saturday, October 30th, 2pm. Please note the early hour of this event. All welcome. There will be doggy biscuits!


1, Lay them out and 2, print them out.


3, Cut them out and stick them to the wall for a photo. 4, post to your pals.

The book review website thebookbag.co.uk has been the first to read Lost Dogs. Read their opinion here.

Drawing Ballydog

I visited with the older kids at Kirkistown Primary School in Cloughey, Co. Down lately. We had a good discussion, I talked about my own writing and writing stories in general. Before my arrival the students had been creating drawings based on The Badness of Ballydog. They filled a whole corridor wall and it was wonderful to see them.

Miss Grope does not really appear in the book, she is only mentioned in relation to the fact that Andrew and his pack tap electricity from the mains supply in her garage. One student at Kirkistown felt poor Miss Grope deserved more attention.


Miss Grope. That’s the Villa in the background, a bit taller than I’d imagined it.

There was also a drawing of the fish finger factory, complete with a poisoned seagull dropping from the sky. That looks like the janitor in the foreground, about to scoop up the dead bird and throw it in with the rest of the fish finger's ingredients.


This is pretty much exactly how I’d imagined the fish finger factory. The janitor also happens to be May’s dad and I think he looks about right in this drawing too.

Thank you to all the artists and to everyone else at Kirkistown for the very enjoyable visit.

If anybody else out there has any drawings based on my books or characters I’d love to see them. It would be great if you could take a digital photo or scan them in and send them to me. I will try to put them on this blog.

Ballydog has a Good Day

The Badness of Ballydog has been shortlisted for the Heart of Hawick Children’s Book Award 2011. Hawick is in the Scotland/England border region and deciding which book wins the award involves ten schools in the area. 600 students will soon begin reading and reviewing the shortlist and will vote next year.

A brilliant addition to the usual book prizes is that students are able to win awards for the best-written reviews. Next May someone will be voted “Best young reviewer of the year.” So everybody gets a go at entering their writing for honours.



Students also make short animations based on the books they’ve read. Last year children from six primary schools worked with an animator at Hawick Public Library to make the above trailer. It is for a book called Dog Lost by Ingrid Lee. In a month I happen to have a book coming out called Lost Dogs, that’s a good enough excuse to show their trailer on this blog.

Here’s the whole 2011 shortlist:

Meteorite Strike by A G Taylor.
Wilma Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts by Emma Kennedy.
The Chess Piece Magician by Douglas Burton.
The Great Hamster Massacre by Katie Davies.
The Badness of Ballydog by Garrett Carr.

Thank you to everyone involved for the nomination of my book. Click here to visit the award’s website.

Hot Spots of Britain and Ireland

I have a few solid weeks of writing ahead of me, then I am back on the road. My next events are a couple of appearances at the Wigtown Book festival, in Scotland. I will be in praise of monsters at the Quaker Meeting house on Saturday the 2nd of October. The organisers tell me they have something else planned for me too, I’m not sure where or exactly when.

Wigtown is in south-west Scotland.


Cloughey.

I look forward to meeting some of the pupils of Kirkistown Primary School in Cloughey, County Down on October 6th. At the moment they are having a ‘Narrative Month,’ which sounds like a great idea to me. Such things did not occur in my school when I was a kid. I recall we had a "Let a Bigot Teach History” month when a rather elderly reserve teacher came in and cursed the English for four weeks.

But I shouldn’t complain too much because the following week I return to my home town. County Donegal is having ‘Wainfest,’ with venues spread throughout the county. My first event is in Ballydog … opps, I mean Killybegs. Come along to the town library at 10:30am on the 11th of October if monsters are your thing. If I get out alive I will then be going “in through” (as we say in that part of the world) to Kilcar for an event at 1:30pm.


Rush hour, Kilcar.

The following day, the 12th of October, I’ll be having two events on Aran Island, taking the 10:00am ferry from Burton Port.

13th of October, find me in Moville Library at 10:30am and Buncrana Library at 1:30pm.

14th of October, Na Rosa Library, 10:30am.

Last, for the moment, I will be joining the Children’s Book Festival in Dublin on the 19th of October. I'll having events in the County Library Tallaght at 10:30am and 12 noon.

Phew …

Review Round Up

Lost Dogs will be released on the 1st of November. The book website Bookbag has been the first to review it. Read their opinion here.

There are plenty of reviews of The Badness of Ballydog floating around online. To keep things handy and tidy I list and link to many of them below.

The Times, Verbal Magazine, Ireland 4 kids, The Irish Times, Write Away, The Irish Independent and Bookblabbers. Readers have also put up reviews at Goodreads and on Amazon.

You, Hero

There was a series of adventure game books I loved when I was young. They were presented and occasionally written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I arranged them neatly on a bookshelf, their regular green spines lined up in the correct order. My interest waned around number 35 and the series itself seems to have closed down around number 50. Still, fifty books is not a bad run.

In the books the reader directs the action, choosing where to go next out of a few options. As they say on the cover, “YOU become the hero.” The books were somewhere between a story and a game. You were supposed to use dice too but I think most readers bent the rules plenty. I know I did. Most of the adventures were set in a kind of Middle Earth type world called, if I remember correctly, Titan. Dragons, orcs, hobgoblins, that kind of thing. However science fiction stories were sometimes thrown in too.


It was the illustrations that I was interested in as much as anything. I loved this sea monster, drawn together from discarded bones. Look at the strange fish-with-arms beasts coming out of the shadows either side of it. Cool.

I think the best storyline was Slaves of the Abyss, that book would make a good movie. Some of the game books were themselves based on movies, not in their plots necessarily but in their atmospheres or general feel. Starship Traveller was like Star Trek and Freeway Fighter was like Mad Max. In retrospect I realise The Rings of Kether was based on Bladerunner and the work of Philip K. Dick. This story, number 15, was set in a seedy future, where technology has not saved the human race but rather given us even more ways to be bad.



In The Rings of Kether your mission is to crack an intergalactic drugs cartel. You travel around and sometimes go undercover. There were drug dens inhabited by genetically-adjusted slobs. There were weird mutants, one like a worm with a woman's face and a long tongue. And these books were supposed to be for kids! I recalled that some of the illustrations to The Rings of Kether scared me a bit. But it did not matter, I was hooked.

Reading and Workshop

Last night I put down the final word of book three. However it might change, as might many of the words that came before it. It is still untitled.


Downpatrick, getting attacked by a zombie worm, the real ones aren’t so big.

On 7 August I will be doing an author visit and workshop in Downpatrick. It will be part of their Imagine Festival. Come along if you can. It will be fun and a tiny bit educational. There will be some drawing, some writing and some monsters, many of them real sea creatures you may enjoy learning about. Fact is stranger than fiction, they say, and it’s true. Did you know that at the bottom of the sea there lives a creature called a Bone-Eating Zombie Snot-Worm? Imagine. Come along and I'll introduce you.

Please click here for the Down Arts Centre page.

Two Hells

Gustave Doré was born in 1832 and taught himself to draw as a child. He went on to become a famous illustrator. He had a particularly good eye for monsters.

Perhaps the most famous etchings he produced were illustrations for the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This long poem describes a tour of hell and was written late in the 13th century. People have continued to read Dante’s Inferno to this day, there are many modern translations to choose from. Far more people read the Inferno than the Paradiso, a tour of heaven that Dante also wrote. This is because badness is more interesting than goodness.


Gustave Doré’s Geryon, 1857.

In part 17 of Dante’s Inferno the visitors to hell meet a monster called Geryon. This creature is a symbol of lies and deceit. It has the face of an honest man but (beware!) the tail of a scorpion. However Geryon helps the visitors on their way, carrying them down to the next level of hell. It flies with them on its back, drops them off and quickly flaps away. A 1843 translation describes the scene like so:

Thus, grounding in the bottom of that pit,
To foot o’ the ragged cliff did Geryon bring
Our human freight, and, of his burden quit,
Sped off, like notch of arrow from the string.

A 2004 translation of Dante’s Inferno modernises it, setting the story in a collapsed and tortured American city. The same part of the story is told like so:

… Greyon finally set us down at the bottom of that rocky cliff. As soon as we climbed down from his back, he was off again like a bullet.

Very 21st century but perhaps not as rich. It is odd that the translator changed the name of the monster, Geryon to Greyon. Why do that? But I love Sandow Birk’s illustrations to this 2004 version. He has modernised Gustave Doré’s work, showing that not only words are open to translation. He has reset the illustrations in the dangerous city, where arrows have become bullets, and portrayed it as a sprawl of parking lots and fast-food joints. One of the most striking illustrations is his retelling of the monster of deceit. It has been transformed into a military helicopter.


The new flying montser.


The Minotaur: “Who when he saw us, as with cankerous rage. Inly consuming, his own flesh ‘gan tear.” John Dayman, 1843.


The Minotaur: “When he saw us, he freaked out by biting himself, growling at us and going psycho.” Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, 2004.

In other illustrations Birk has kept much of Doré’s original composition. Elements are arranged in the same way although with a twist or two. In part 12 the visitors meet the half-man-half-bull that is the Minotaur. It has been sent to the seventh circle of hell because of its violent life. Doré drew the Minotaur in a way befitting an artist embedded in the classical tradition. Birk lives in California and his Minotaur is a brash logo. It is spot lit and standing on top of a food stall next door to a petrol station. In the background skyscrapers loom where Doré had drawn mountains.

In all these pictures Sandow Birk captures what people mean by the term ‘urban hell'.

Monsters in Monaghan

At the Flat Lake Festival I managed to herd together a bemused gang of youngsters to tell them about sea monsters. Instead of chairs the audience sat on hay bales. They stayed reasonably bemused, I think. Thank you to everyone who came along.


Thanks to Niamh for this photograph

My next big day out will be a reading and a workshop at Downpatrick’s Children’s Festival on the 7th of August.

Let's Get Lost

Thank you to everyone who came along to my event in No Alibis bookstore during the Belfast Children’s Festival. My next outing is to the Flat Lake Festival in county Monaghan this weekend. Visit their website to get a sense of what an unusual, varied and hay-barn style carnival it will be. Bring your wellies. I will be showing and telling in the children’s tent twice over the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. The theme will be The Badness of Ballydog and the ideas behind it. I will also be giving a short lecture about some real sea monsters in the HURL pavilion.

Jonny Duddle has done it again with the cover for Lost Dogs. It is time to reveal his work.


This is the illustrator's portfolio.

I like the image a lot. Mr Duddle has captured May’s new look very well and, as you can see, another character has joined the trio for this book. When presented with the cover a certain Ms. S. commented that, “Ewan looks like he’s in a boy band” but that's fine by me. I think that's just right. Lost Dogs is the sequel to The Badness of Ballydog and will be out in November. I am still trying to think up a title for the third book.

Help me find the third book's title

The titles The Badness of Ballydog and Lost Dogs were both dreamed up in minutes. But the search for the title for the third and final book of the trilogy has been going on for months. So now I am asking for any ideas you might have. I would welcome and appreciate any suggestions.


The setting looks a bit like this

The last book is set in a valley high in a Northern Irish mountain range. In the valley is a lake with a village by its shore. The village is the opposite of Ballydog. Their community is a utopia, everyone is sweetness and light. The citizens are all blessed with long and contented lives. But they have a secret, revealed early in the plot. The lake is home to a monster.

Here are some titles I like, although not quite enough:

Last Days of Legend
Trial by Water
The Last Days of Lough Linger
Dark Water
Monster Rise
Human Soup
Lost Soul Lake

You could build on any of the above or be original. No suggestion too crazy. There’s a prize for the winner. Not sure what yet.

About Me (No.1)

My name is Garrett Carr. I grew up in a town a bit like Ballydog and now live in a city a bit like Hardglass. I was born in the summer of 1975. By the time I was ten I was obsessed with monsters. Day and night I would be found drawing them.


A drawing from my childhood that I discovered in the attic


This is me a few weeks ago, hunting a monster

Professionally, I come from a background in illustration. I specialised in the creation of visual tools for education in health and law, using images to reach out to the young, or across language barriers. I did that kind of work for governmental agencies in my native Ireland and for development agencies in Latin America.

There is more random information about me on my page on my publisher’s website.

At this link is a recording of an interview with me about The Badness of Ballydog. It is quite long, early 20 minutes. I am sorry to say about half of that time is me going, ‘ummm.’

Here is a video of me reading a short extract from The Badness of Ballydog.

Festival Events

Apart from school visits I have a plenty of festival events lined up for the next few months. I will be making a couple of appearances at the Children’s Book Festival, Tallaght, Co. Dublin later in the year. Those events are being organised by the library service. I am looking forward to a trip to Scotland to be part of the Wigstown Festival at the end of September. HURL, Home University Roscommon Leitrim, are going to have a tent at the Flat Lake Festival in Co. Monaghan. I will be there to give a lecture on a true monster of the deep. The last time I spoke for them I focused on the Colossal Squid but this time I am not sure what I will talk about, there are plenty more monsters in the sea.

My first festival appearance will be later this month. I’ll be at No Alibis on the 22nd of May as part of the Belfast’s Children’s Festival. It is free but places must be booked.

Dreadful Dragon Dreamed

If you were paying attention in class you’ll know that alliteration is the repetition of sounds at the beginning of words, often just the first letter or two. I go in for a bit of alliteration myself, hence the title The Badness of Ballydog and phrases in it, “Borrowed barrels” and “a rock rolling” for example. I like to put a bit of music in my writing.


King Arthur and Merlin watching dragons fight.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure took the style to the extreme, using alliteration at almost every opportunity. It is a poem of over 4000 lines written in Middle English. It is about the life of the legendary King Arthur. Nobody knows when it was first written down but it seems likely that it was during the 14th century when using alliteration was very popular. Reading Middle English is hard work so it is good to know that, at the moment, the English poet Simon Armitage is working on a modern version. What he produces will flow better to today’s readers and we will be able to enjoy it next year.

I’m sure Mr Armitage is doing a better job but in the meantime here’s my version of one small section, where King Arthur has a vision of a dragon. Describing a dragon as a shrimp is odd to today’s ears but I kept that in from the original. I tried to stay true to plentiful alliteration, changing whatever else was necessary to do so. It is probably more fun if you read it out loud.

He dreamed of a dragon, dreadful to behold
Come driving over deep to drown his people
Driven directly from the west, a wanderer unworthy
Covered completely in silver scales
This shrimp was enamelled in shinning shards
Its womb and its wings were wondrous colours
In this marvellous mail it mounted the sky
Whoever it lashed was lost forever
Its feet were flourished in fine fur
Such fierce flame flowed from its lips
The sea itself seemed seared with fire

Here’s the original I worked from, I got it from this online resource. The notes on the website helped me too, as you can see many of the words are no longer used and I needed the translation the site provided.

Him dremed of a dragon - dredful to behold,
Come drivand over the deep - to drenchen his pople,
Even walkand - out the West landes,
Wanderand unworthyly - over the wale ythes
Both his hed and his hals - were holly all over
Ounded of azure, - enamelled full fair
His shoulders were shaled - all in clene silver
Shredde over all the shrimp - with shrinkand pointes;
His womb and his winges - of wonderful hewes,
In marvelous mailes - he mounted full high.
Whom that he touched - he was tint forever!
His feet were flourished - all in fine sable
And such a venomous flaire - flow from his lippes
The flood of the flawes - all on fire seemed!

The description of the dragon starts at line 760 of the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It is followed by the description of a giant bear charging from the east. The two beasts do battle. It's like a 15th century King Kong. These days we have talented animators and special effects to bring monsters to life. In the 14th century writers were using alliteration to make their monsters live and flow, sweeping the audience away.

Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni

Recently I discovered something called the Home University Roscommon Leitrim. HURL events consist of members of the public giving a lecture on anything they know about. You get ten minutes to talk about the subject of your enthusiasm. The basic idea is that people come together for some relaxed learning. “Soft knowledge” one member called it. Last week in Cootehall village, Co. Roscommon they had an event. I was one of the speakers and I think my show went down well. There were a few laughs even though we were discussing a real monster.


The Colossal Squid, copyright; www.deepseaphotography.com

Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni, or the Colossal Squid, is a creature we knew about for fifty years before one was caught or even seen by humans. We knew they existed because parts of tentacles were occasionally washed up on shore or found in the stomachs of dead whales. The Colossal Squid’s tentacles are very distinctive, they bristle with weapons. Little teeth in the suckers and revolving hooks on the ends of its tentacles mean that once a Colossal Squid has grabbed you, you stay grabbed. The biggest Colossal Squid ever caught was 8 metres long but it is reckoned they can grow to twice that.



This is hard for us landlubbers to grasp just how alien this life-forms is. Its brain is the shape of a donut. Its throat passes through the hole in the middle. Anything it eats has to be broken into small pieces before they swallow it, otherwise it can give itself brain damage. It mouth is a beak, like a parrot’s beak. Its blood is not red, its blood is blue. It has three hearts.

The Colossal Squid’s eyes can be the size of beach balls. These are the biggest eyes in the world and possibly the biggest eyes that ever evolved on this planet. About 80% of its brain is dedicated to its optics. That goes to show how important vision is to the Colossal Squid. Most species of squid have their eyes on the sides of their heads so they can watch all around them. This proves a certain wariness, most squid watch their backs. But the Colossal Squid’s eyes are positioned forwards on its head. Having eyes to the front of the head is a characteristic of predators. In this way Colossal Squids are like wolves, like hawks, like humans. It is a hunter.



Many scientists and researchers agree that squid, of all types, are both getting physically bigger and getting bigger in numbers. Dr George Jackson of Tasmania's Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies thinks large squid are the new "big players of the ocean." Many of their natural competitors and enemies have been overfished, by us, and this has triggered a population explosion. Furthermore global warming has warmed the ocean to temperatures that suit them better. Squid are now growing and breeding quicker. "You just heat them up a little bit and everything just ticks over that much faster,” says Jackson.

So the Colossal Squid is big, it is nasty and it is mysterious. Those things alone would qualify the creature for true monster of the deep status. But look at Jackson’s research and we can add another issue, they’re coming. As I told the audience at the HURL event, be afraid. They laughed at that, it was nervous laughter though.

Links:
HURL's blog.
More information on the Colossal Squid at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Rough Sea on a Rough Draft

Thank you to every one at Sullivan Prep, Holywood, who made me very welcome last week. I meet with two large groups. Several students asked me about The Badness of Ballydog’s cover illustration. It’s a small coincidence that the very next day the illustrator himself was writing about the job on his blog. He posted up the first draft of the work.


The Badness of Ballydog, rough cover.

Click this link to go to Jonny Duddle’s blog. Click this link to go to his portfolio where you can see other examples of his work.

Elephant Versus Dragon Versus Wyvern

I have begun school visits and giving presentations at bookshops. I enjoy meeting readers and hearing their views. I am sometimes surprised by what attracts the attention of young people. In The Gutter Bookshop, Dublin, my audience were completely fascinated by the jobs I’d done in fish factories when I was a teenager. One girl wanted to know how much I was paid for writing a book. When her friends made it clear they thought that was an impolite question she became indignant. ‘I just want to make sure the man’s making a living,’ she said.


In the Gutter Bookshop, Dublin.


A Bestiary. c. 1255 - 1265. Harley MS 3244, f.39v.

During my presentation I talk about the history of monsters. I often show the young people this image. It is from a 13th century English manuscript called a Bestiary. It shows a dragon threatening an elephant. It is an interesting image because the person who drew it would never have seen either creature. It is hard to know which of the two beasts would have seemed more freakish.

Bestiary’s were a popular in those times. They were a kind of dictionary of nature. The fantastical monsters seemed more credible by being placed along side commonplace creatures, sheep for example. According to the book Monsters & Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts, by Alixe Bovey, Bestiaries can be seen as a foretaste of what grew, over creatures, into natural history. However Bestiaries seek moral drama in the creatures of the world and even an insight into the mind of God. In the story illustrated by the above image the elephant represents good and the dragon represents evil.

But is it a dragon? During my presentations several young people have told me that the creature is in fact a wyvern. ‘You can tell because it’s got two legs,’ I was assuredly told. The students of Wesley College were especially expert. It seemed the whole crowd, and there were over an hundred and fifty present, knew what a wyvern was and how to distinguish it from a dragon. It turns out that the Wesley has a wyvern of its own. It is on the school crest.


A section of the Wesley College crest. The wyvern's legs are to the front but the creature uses its tail to support its hindquarters.


In Wesley, I stuck this photo together from three different images.

Thank you to everyone who came along and made my shows possible. I hope you enjoyed the monsters.

Lesser Spotted Bookstore Turtle

The Lesser Spotted Bookstore Turtle was in attendance last Thursday night in No Alibis Bookstore, Belfast. The get-together was to launch The Badness of Ballydog. A crowd of people came along and I did a lot of signing. Thank you to David for the use of his bookshop and to Fiona for creating the cake. This leatherback is made of layered sponge and has green icing for a shell. As you can see it was quite big but there was none left by the end of the celebrations.

True Monster of the Deep

200 million years ago much of the dry land on earth was gathered into a supercontinent called Pangaea. The waters surrounding it could be called a superocean. This vast body of water has been named Panthalassa. A big ocean deserves a big reptile and, sure enough, it was the home of the Ichthyosaur. Some of these creatures were vast bodies themselves. The bones of a giant ichthyosaur unearthed in Canada lately add up to the largest marine reptile ever found, like an articulated truck … with fins.


Note the scale of the person in the image. However not every species of Ichthyosaur reached the monstrous size of this example.

Big eyes indicate Ichthyosaurs were probably deep divers, used to being deep in the dark sea. They probably ate squid, shellfish and other reptiles and were at swim for around 150 million years. That is a long time by any standard, therefore we can say they must have had a wide-ranging diet. One sure way for a species to die off fast is to focus on only one type of food and refuse to eat anything else. If your source of food disappears then you are bound to follow. The Ichthyosaur was not fussy and the giant Ichthyosaur in particular was able to eat virtually anything it meet. Few of us would not like to meet one when going for a swim.

A set of fossils from the United States adds more to our vision of this awesome predator. In Nevada dozens of Ichthyosaurs were found fossilised together. They were all pointed in the same direction and this has lead some to suggest that the creatures went about in pods, like dolphins do today. Imagine a dozen of these giants swimming at you through the blue Panthalassa.

Know the Kappa

In Japan, parents warn their children about the Kappa. The Kappa is a water imp that smells of fish, eats cucumbers and has a head shaped like a bowl. Parents may have invented the creature in order to keep their children from wandering too close to dangerous lakes and rivers. Or perhaps the Kappa really is there, watching from among the reeds.

"Skin like a catfish." A 18th Century Kappa.

It would have been there a long time. The Kappa in the above image was captured and then sketched sometime about 1770 near present-day Tokyo. According to the text that accompanies the illustration it was two feet tall and had skin like a catfish. Later, an illustrated guide to twelve types of kappa was produced, based on sightings and reports. The crawling creature in the image below is one.


See the whole document here.

Later, in the 1850s, a well-known Kappa lived in the Tone River. Its name was Neneko. It moved along to new locations along the river each year, taking lives wherever it went.


Neneko.

Most portrayals that I have seen of the Kappa show it as a smallish beast. This might explain why it always goes after children, Kappas are not big enough to take an adult. Once claimed, the child is dragged under the water and either drowned or, some say, converted into a Kappa themselves. The victim becomes amphibious, grows scales and soon cannot be distinguished from its surrogate family. It embarks on a new life, grubbing around riverbanks and watching for opportunities to gain a brother or a sister. I wonder how long it takes for the kidnapped child to forget its previous life. Perhaps it never does, and this sense of loss and loneliness is what has it leaping from rivers at children. Maybe the Kappa just wants to play, but whatever the reason another child is dragged under and the cycle continues.


Wooden carving of a Kappa, observe the bowl in its head. Collection of the National Museums of Scotland.

Should you encounter a Kappa it is vital to remember the following defense: The Kappa is a water creature and needs to maintain contact with its native element or it will become feeble. It has a bowl shaped head for holding water as it emerges on a kidnapping mission. The water-holding bowl can be seen clearly in a small carving I found in a museum lately. But the bowl is not exactly the Kappa’s weakness. Its weakness is its politeness, its Japanese culture of respect. If a Kappa comes at you quickly bow to it. The Kappa will be immediately compelled to bow back at you. With its head bowed the water will spill from the bowl and the Kappa will become weak. It will immediately have to dive back in the river, or die.