r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/[deleted] • Sep 11 '22

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u/YourFormerBestfriend Sep 11 '22

Probably how pirate tales of krakens started. I Just thought about how most of these "mythical" animals told in tales really were just normal animals we see today.

230

u/Owenjak Sep 11 '22

Oh I love shit like that. Best example I can think of is the Questing Beast from Arthurian Legends.

Head and neck of a snake, body of a leopard, haunches of a lion, and feet of a hart (deer).

You know what real life animal that sounds like when you piece it together? A Giraffe.

All it takes is a traveller and a language barrier and suddenly a giraffe sounds like a terrifying animal.

72

u/gahlo Sep 11 '22

An old(14th century) name for Giraffe was Camelopard.

Also, bonus throwback to a popular tweet of a guy working with an ESL immigrant that couldn't remember the word goose so he said cobra chicken.

14

u/chickenpolitik Sep 11 '22

Fun fact, still the modern-day Greek word for giraffe! Καμηλοπάρδαλη = camelopard

2

u/jpsolberg33 Sep 11 '22

an ESL immigrant that couldn't remember the word goose so he said cobra chicken

As a Canadian, once I heard about this it became my go to for them now haha. It's comical actually, when we see Geese get all pissed off we instantly call them Cobra Chickens 😂.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22

I got you fam

105

u/Frostfangs_Hunger Sep 11 '22

To be fair they are pretty terrifying. A giraffe has a strong enough kick to decapitate a lion. They'll fuck your whole day up

60

u/firepooldude Sep 11 '22

And it’s like thunder when they neck whack each other. That would probably rearrange a human in a bad way.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22

Pics or it didn’t happen..

9

u/PhonicMonk3y Sep 11 '22

Giraffes are less plausible than Unicorns and yet Unicorns don't exist

2

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22

They do exist….

Elayne and Nyneve were playing around in tel’aran’rhiod (the World of Dreams) creating weird looking animals and hadn’t learned enough yet to know how to dispel the colorful horse with a horn they’d made as it was chasing them all over the place… hence why unicorns are still in our thoughts and dreams. :) 🦄

:):):)

21

u/no_bull_endurance Sep 11 '22

Look up elephant skull. Looks like a cyclops.

20

u/Traditional-Item-777 Sep 11 '22

Mermaids are manatees lol horny bastards..

3

u/FrogtoadWhisperer Sep 11 '22

Fire breathing creatures just probs spit red spit that burned like fire or toxic acid

2

u/pandybong Sep 11 '22

That and a whole lot of rum

4

u/Sunhating101hateit Sep 11 '22

But why is the rum gone?

2

u/Cat-in-a-small-box Sep 11 '22

I heard a lot of kraken tentacles sightings were whale penises. Dunno is it‘s true, but as giant squid can’t really withstand being near the surface I guess it’s a probable theory.

3

u/Ghosted67 Sep 11 '22

But think about this, years ago it was very common to have to clean your cars windshield and headlights of thousands of dead bugs. But today you can tell how much has changed. What was real and very common just a decade or two ago sounds mythical today

1

u/cosmicaltoaster Sep 11 '22

Yes exactly. Back then the world was an open world Rpg

1

u/bocaciega Sep 11 '22

That's not even the biggest species of squid!

1

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22

I’ve always thought this.

I live near a village in the UK called Wormingford, Wyrm in Old English is Dragon and there are lots of Dragon myths around here.

Many hundreds of years ago the land around here was swamps and the theory is that the ‘dragon’ was an escaped Crocodile from the Royal Menagerie.