The spooky ray

We can pin-point the head and the wings of the dragon if we look at it from the bottom. Rays are clearly very well-suited to turn into something like a dragon. The bottom of the head looks, to the human eye, a lot like a face staring back at us. What looks like eyes are actually its nostrils – the real eyes are on top of its head.

Mot dragons were made by pointing the head of the ray upwards, towards the viewer. This was certainly the case for the 18th century dragon in Naturalis. Then, the ray’s wings were cut so that they looked like dragon wings. If not, the result would look more like a snake, like it did with Gessner.

It’s not that difficult to work out how to cut the ray in order to make it dragon-shaped. The most complicated part of the process is the drying, and Gessner doesn’t really tell us a lot about how that worked. It wasn’t unusual to dry fish in order to preserve it, either by using salt, or by smoking it above fire. A combination of these methods, salt first and then smoking, also occurred.

But not all these methods are suitable for making dragons, which weren’t meant to be preserved for consumption, but for making it through the ages without going bad. It’s most likely that this was done by salting them extensively to extract any sort of moisture, and then varnishing them, so that they would stay dry.

Gessner leaves a lot of things unclear, but we can still distil the methods used for making a dragon from them. Plus, we can learn a thing or two from the dragon specimens still in existence.