According to the story, Louis Feuillée was shown this creature in Argentina on August 26, 1708. He drew the creature that he saw and later reported it to the King of France. Feuillée was unable to examine the creature up close, but secretly sketched the creature while seeing it from nearby. He then left and drew in the rest of the details of the creature. The creature was supposedly 11 inches long with the face and bodily features of a newborn, denoting that this creature was a stillborn being and thus probably very dead.
This creature was described as “a monster born of a ewe” and went on to describe it to be a chimera of a horse, calf, and a human child. The photo comes from the NOAA Library, item libr0408.
Visit http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/library/monster.html for a complete translation of Feuillés’ account of the monster.
The chances of genetic mutation are rare and this monster reminded me of a story that I read a while ago about a mutant stillborn sheep with a human face. (Warning–contains a graphic photo) I would have to say that the odds of the Feuillés monster being something similar to this are highly likely if Feuillé did in fact see this creature. Even today, 300 years later, we would describe this creature as a monster, so this recent story gives credence to this bizarre tale. In a way, the Turkish mutant sheep takes away some of the fantasitcal charm of the Feuillé monster, but at least Feuillé doesn’t come across as crazy anymore.
I decided to go ahead and presume that this is, in fact, a monster and not a mutant sheep, and thus it could and would grow up to adult form. This is what I believe Feuillé depicted in the drawing and what I re-created.
I went ahead and used the body of a sheep for my interpretation as I find it an unlikely for a creature described as having sheep origins to have the body of a sheep. I compared the body structures of Louis Feuillée’s drawing and a photo of a sheep and found similarities in the breast and head of the sheep. I do not believe the presence of wool diminishes the representation of the original as if it was a sheep monster, it would have both woolly and sheared forms. The initial account described the ears as being horse-like, I used those of a giraffe as they fit the illustration more accurately. I used a human eye, modified to be cycloptic rather than bicloptic, and mouth since these features were distinctly human.
I remember how I felt the first time I played Megaman X on Super Nintendo — it was both a mix of awe of the graphic upgrade from the NES Megaman series and pure auditory bliss from the continued greatness of the Megaman/Rockman musical legacy.
Then I got to the boss at the end of the first level: a purple guy named Vile that the game prevents you from beating. Only a pop-in appearance from a hero named Zero allows you to progress through the game.
Left: Vile; Right: Boba Fett
At first, I was more concerned with trying to make a dent in Vile’s health bar. When I realized that doing this was impossible, I noticed that, somehow, I was fighting a purple Boba Fett.
There’s no doubt about it, I was fighting the purple Boba Fett, not some random robot guy named Vile.
Of course, Boba Fett doesn’t exist in the Megaman universe, but apparently his Mandalorian helmet style does.
It isn’t even limited to just Vile, either. I swear I saw some guys walking around in The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind that have the Fett helmet style, as well. It sure is a popular helmet style.
Its been a rough year for Conan O’Brien. Except for that huge severance paycheck. Unemployment and the massive amount of free time that comes along with it leads to a number of things: one of them being a re-evaluation of oneself that results in an analysis of career goals. Usually joining the Empire isn’t part of those results.
This 1997 figure came as a pack-in in with Hasbro’s AT-AT (the 4-legged walkers from “The Empire Strikes Back”) toy vehicle. While it is supposed to be General Veers from the movie, it looks more like the ginger-headed talk show veteran than the Imperial officer that it is intended.
Maybe its just a dried apple that was carved into a face.
I hear that frog men are great at parties. Check out the second entry to our journey into the world if monsters were real with the frog man monster from Gaspar Schott’s 1662 book, “Physia Curiosa.”
I found this creature in a book called “Physica Curiosa” on the same website that I found the Feuille Monster, the NOAA Photo Library (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/libr0670.htm). The book contains illustrations of various monsters and beasts from mythology including a cyclops, triton, and satyr, but this fellow was quite perplexing.
The frog man of Schott’s “Physica Curiosa” is depicted as having a hairless human body with the face of a frog and human hair on its head. While the drawing does not show the frog man with bulgy eye stalks, I would find it silly not to interpret this being as having frog eye stalks otherwise its not much of a “frog man.” I don’t know what the text to the right of him means exactly, except that “rana” is the scientific genus of generic pond frogs, so I’m certain that this is a frog monster.
Unlike the sheep monster from the previous entry into “If Monsters Were Real,” this character has no backstory. He (or she… I can’t tell if they gave this male or female human or frog bits) is simply a human/frog combination that appeared in a book that was a collection of various human hybrids and other mythic beasts. I’ve never heard of a frog man in any traditional or classic mythos so I’d have to assume that he came from a loacal legend or folkloric tale.
Since it is a humanoid and seems to be able to communicate (hence the hand gesture), I would assume that — while the one depicted in Schott’s illustration — frog men (and women) would be a part of society or at least have their own.
Originally posted 14 July 2010.
Action figures of topless fat guys usually don’t fly off the shelves (barring, of course, if they ever made a fat, topless Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson action figure), so its only natural that most people probably have no idea who this action figure is of. It doesn’t reallly matter… because he looks like Colin Mochrie’s (from TV’s “Whose Line is it Anyway?”) bizarre, Rancor-keeping doppelganger!
In the Star Wars universe, our fellow here is known as Malakili, Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor keeper in Return of the Jedi. Remember that guy that cries when Luke kills the epic Rancor beast in Jabba’s palace? This is that guy. Kids love that guy. You know, all your friends were playing with the Cobra Commander and Megatron and you had this guy. You poor bastard.
This figure has had three different versions over the years: an original from the 80s, this figure here from the late 90s, and a new version from 2009 (sometime I’ll update this article with pictures of that version). This is the late 90s version.
It really doesn’t matter who this character is: the bottom line is that this kind of figure doesn’t have a whole lot of child appeal, so these kinds of characters are thrown into collectible figure lines as collector fan service and often wind up as “peg warmers,” which I discussed at length in my Indiana Jones figure retrospective, because collectors don’t need to buy multiples of them and kids tend to avoid them.
Strange things happen every day, whether its running into an old friend to seeing something weird like a monkey running down the street. This story launches our “just weird” section and hopefully establishes the tone of this column.
This watch appeared from out of thin air on the hood of my car and we have no idea how it got there.
It all begins with a routine trip to Toys ‘R’ Us. Erin and I were in the store for about ten minutes and when we returned to the car, we did not see the watch on the hood. I’d go as far as to say that we were 100% sure that the watch was not on the hood of the car before we went into the store, nor was it there when we returned. I started driving home and we talked as usual until a strange thing started wiggling around behind the windshield wipers. The car went through some pretty sharp bends in the road and the wiggly thing moved closer into view: it was a watch band. There were no sudden noises so the watch couldn’t have falled or been thown at the car. We continued driving for several miles at 40 mph approx. and the watch didn’t seem to move at all.
We eventually pulled off into a neighborhood and Erin removed the watch from the hood of the car so that we wouldn’t lose it. It was then that we gathered some details from the watch: it was a woman’s watch with a thin leather wristband. The clasp of the watch had worn the closest hole to the watch so it had been worn by someone with a skinny wrist. The watch was also still ticking.
Upon our return home, we noticed that there was a circular mark of broken glass on the hood that was neither from impact nor caused any actual damage to the car. It was, simply put, some crud in a circular shape and broken glass. There were no marks that would have indicated that the watch landed in one location and moved to another. Not even the drive home moved the watch from its initial position.
We began theorizing about how the watch got onto the hood of the car. Several fantastical possibilities came to mind:
Scenario 1: Someone threw the watch from a bridge and it landed on the car as we drove under. Perhaps it was a jilted woman that threw a watch that her mischievous lover had given her for a special occasion such as a birthday or anniversary. We didn’t drive under any bridges or overpasses on the trip home so it couldnt have been this scenario.
Scenario 2: As a practical joke on a co-worker, someone had hung the watch from the light in the parking lot that we had parked under. While this could have been a reason the watch would have appeared on the hood while we were in the store, it surely would have caused some form of impact on the hood and sent the glass flying. Our analysis showed that the glass on the hood of the car would have filled in all of the broken glass of the watch face, not to mention that it would have likely broken the mechanisms inside the watch itself.
Scenario 3: The watch simply fell out of the sky. Maybe a woman inside of a plane was opening a window and her watch somehow came off and flew out the window, only to land on our car while we were taking those curves. There were no planes in the area so it would have had to have been some kind of top-secret military stealth plane with total sound silencing and a cloaking device that rendered it totally invisible to the human eye. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Except the pesky problem that there was no sound of impact, plus the velocity of any fall greater than a few feet would have scattered the glass from the watch’s face all over the hood and/or parking lot, but all of the broken glass from the watch face was indeed under the watch on the hood. This glass didn’t even scatter from its original position after we removed the watch from the car’s hood.
Scenario 4: Someone placed the watch on the car while we were in the store. While this seems the most logical of the scenarios, it leaves us with a few unanswered questions. Why did this person place the watch face-down on the car’s hood? One would assume that if someone had picked up a watch off the ground and placed it on the closest car, it was an act of helping someone out. After all, if you find something on the ground that appeared to belong to someone nearby, you would assumedly try and return it to them. Unless, of course, if you were a dirty thief. If this was the case, why would this samaratain place the watch face-down on the hood and ultimately break the watch face? Wouldn’t they place it face-up so that it wouldn’t get broken? Also, if this samaratain had the goal of returning the watch, why didn’t he or she take it inside the Toys ‘R’ Us and leave it with the customer service desk in case the person that lost the watch came looking for it inside of the store rather than on the hood of a car? The other issue with this scenario is that neither Erin nor I saw the watch near us in the parking lot as we drove into our spot, nor did we see it as we got out of the car and walked up to the store. There is also the possibility that the watch had been in the parking lot for a day or more, but we find this not to be a possibility since just the day before we’d had half a foot of snow. A watch with a leather band would have surely taken some damage from a burial in snow for 24+ hours, plus it would have had some water damage or rust, but it showed signs of neither.
Scenario 5: A woman used a prototype teleportation device in a building that we were driving by and her destination was a building across the street. As she was broken down into her basic molecular structure and sent to her destination through a wi-fi device, our car intercepted the signal, causing the molecules that made up her watch spontaneously re-form back into the watch on the hood of the car.
Originally posted 11 April 2009.