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Monsters & Marvels
The Nature Library is a sober field guide in fifteen volumes — but the living world refused to stay sober. Gathered from across the volumes: the creatures its authors could barely believe themselves, each linking to its full page.
The Kraken, Confirmed
Genus Architeuthis — the giant squids
Tentacles thirty to forty feet long, suckers “as big as dinner plates,” and eyes that gleam — the book says it plainly — “with a sort of fiendish intelligence.” The entry quotes Bishop Pontoppidan’s 1751 account of a monster rising like “a number of islands,” then confirms the legend with science: tentacles nearly thirty feet long recovered from the stomachs of sperm whales — where their digested remains become ambergris, the staple perfume.
Volume XV · Shells
The Unicorn Shells
Genus Monoceros
Real unicorns, an inch or two long: sea snails named for the single distinct tooth or horn on the shoulder of the outer lip. The unicorn, it turns out, was hiding in a tide pool.
Volume XV · Shells
The Great Kissing-Bug Scare
Family Reduviidae — the assassin bugs
Cannibal bugs, pirate bugs, the “gigantic bed-bug,” and the species behind the newspaper “kissing bug” panic that swept the eastern states after the summer of 1898. One immature form disguises itself under a coat of dust; a thread-legged cousin tiptoes into spiders’ webs and robs the spiders of their prey.
Volume · Insects
The Snake That Cannot Be Poisoned
Ophibolus getulus — the common king snake
Meet a rattlesnake, and the king snake winds itself around its “astonished adversary” and squeezes; the rattler “uses its fangs freely” on its tormentor, “but to no effect, as the King Snake is entirely immune to snake poison.” The wounds, the book adds, merely enrage it.
Volume · Reptiles
The Devil’s Darning Needles
Order Odonata — the dragon-flies
The folklore file on one harmless insect: “darning needles” that will sew up the ears of bad boys, “snake feeders” and “snake doctors” that physic water snakes, “flying adders” in Scotland, “horse stingers” in England — every name an accusation, none of them true.
Volume · Insects
The Electric Light Bugs
Family Belostomatidae — the giant water bugs
Pond predators that eat fish — until their wings grow in, when they fly into the hearts of great cities and mob the electric lights on the tops of high buildings in such “extraordinary numbers” that thousands are crushed underfoot by passers-by. The city named them for its own invention.
Volume · Insects