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Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina Navigatoria, 1516 This is the second and less famous of Waldseemüller’s two great world maps; the lone surviving copy of his first, on which we see the word America first written, was bought for $10 million in 2001 by the Library of Congress. This detail depicts an odd elephant-like creature in the Arctic Ocean off of Scandinavia, possibly engraved by the artist Albrecht Dürer. The Latin text explains that this is the abode of the “morsus,” a strange animal with “large, quadrangular teeth.” In other words, this was the artist’s conception of a walrus, based on secondhand descriptions from sailors. In most of Europe at the time, real-life creatures like walruses, giraffes, and rhinoceroses would have seemed just as fantastic as any sea serpent or dragon.

Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina Navigatoria, 1516

This is the second and less famous of Waldseemüller’s two great world maps; the lone surviving copy of his first, on which we see the word America first written, was bought for $10 million in 2001 by the Library of Congress. This detail depicts an odd elephant-like creature in the Arctic Ocean off of Scandinavia, possibly engraved by the artist Albrecht Dürer. The Latin text explains that this is the abode of the “morsus,” a strange animal with “large, quadrangular teeth.”

In other words, this was the artist’s conception of a walrus, based on secondhand descriptions from sailors. In most of Europe at the time, real-life creatures like walruses, giraffes, and rhinoceroses would have seemed just as fantastic as any sea serpent or dragon.

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26 notes
Monday Mar 3 @ 05:40pm
tagged as: maps. map. history. monsters. dragon.

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    Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina Navigatoria, 1516 … This detail depicts an odd elephant-like creature in the Arctic...
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    Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina Navigatoria, 1516 … This detail depicts an odd elephant-like creature in the Arctic...
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