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.