Of economic interest

In the end, our dragon ended up at Naturalis. When we look at the dragon, we immediately notice its size: it’s very small (and it has nothing to do with the big animals around it!). It’s only 15 cm long.

In general, the dragons that were preserved the early modern period are, compared to rays as we know them from the fish auction or the fish market, pretty small. This leads us to conclude that, in order to make the dragons, you had the use young, small rays, that had the advantage of being more agile than the older ones, and dried out much faster.

But there are other reasons to make dragons using mostly young rays. Nowadays, when you buy a ray at the fish auction, you usually end up with a 4.5 lbs. fish. Smaller ones than that aren’t available: they are considered by-catch and are thrown back into the water right away. This leads us to believe that small rays weren’t very interesting, from a circular standing point, in the early modern period either. Then, too, they would have ended up as by-catch. Since there’s not a lot of meat on a tiny ray like that, it would have made sense to make dragons out of them instead, so that they could still be of use.

And not just any use: it would have probably been good money to palm off innocent collectors on these dragons that smelled just a bit fishy. Even now, three centuries later, this little dragon is still trying to mislead us.

In 2018, the ‘A New History of Fishes’ project of the University of Leiden fabricated a dragon based entirely on the instructions in Gessner’s text. Want to find out more? Click on the link below.