Bishop Bell's Behemoth, Or The Paleontological Prelate

The following would appear to be facts:* Bishop Bell died in 1495 or 1496.* The brasswork of Bishop Bell's tomb is decorated with a number of animal images; the images below are clearly meant to be more animals. * If we had to identify these animals from the rather crude engravings, then certainly the one at the front of the picture looks more like a standard quadrapedal dinosaur than anything else.* Tampering with the image would involve removing whatever was engraved there and engraving something else, while the brass was affixed to the foloor in the middle of Carlisle Cathedral. Besides the implausibility of any such hoax, there is also no evidence whatsoever that anything like this ever happened.* All the geological evidence we have suggests that dinosaurs went extinct around the end of the Cretaceous period.* No chronicler records dinosaurs or anything like them roaming around fifteenth century England.* The Cathedral and other old buildings of Carlisle are built out of red sandstone quarried locally. ** In the late fifteenth century, the Fratry (monastic institution) just opposite the Cathedral, was almost entirely rebuilt *, out of this same red sandstone. A picture of the Fratry can be seen here.* Looking at a geological map, *, we find that Carlisle is situated in an area of Upper Triassic bedrock. (Carlisle is not marked on the map, but you can find it here By looking at the geological map in the same spot, we can see that it's built on stratum 15, i.e. the Upper Triassic.* Basal dinosaurs such as the Melanorosauridae [Palaeos: Page not found] are known from English rocks of the Upper Triassic, and were quadrapedal like the dinosaurs on Bishop Bell's tomb.* People who have never seen living dinosaurs can still draw pictures of them, as demonstrated by the picture of a melanosaurid below. ---The following is conjecture:* In the late fifteenth century, Cumbrian quarrymen unearthed the fossil bones of a Triassic dinosaur. They drew this to the attention of the local clergy, who were able to make a crude reconstruction of the beast by studying its bones.It is, however, a conjecture which fits the facts.What do you think? Is this plausible?Does anyone have an explanation which fits the facts better?

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Wow! Seems plausible to me. I presume you've seen pictures of the dwarf elephant fossils (from Sicily or Sardinia??) that are hypothesized to have started the Cyclops story? This is no more odd - and a reasonably complete dinosaur fossil would certainly have attracted some attention in 1500: "Look, dragon bones!!"The Classics Pages - Odyssey: Cyclops 2Edited by Coragyps, : add Cyclops link

It's not impossible, but I would look to the bestiaries of the period first. It is quite possible that it's just an inaccurate representation of an extant animal. (And, I would guess, an animal with some symbolic meaning).

DrAdequate Well it appears to me that there are discrepancies in detail. For instance what are we to make of those projections from the shoulders of the beast on the right? Certainly those are not found on Melanorosauridae are they?

Not a reptile-I would tend to agree with Paul.Perhaps the text intended the heads to be obscured. The left creature certainly is more mammalian and the tail on the right still looks like a cat (mountain lion).Then bend in the tail seems to mask functionality drawn in by the artist and implicates some kind of muscular bulk able to apply some torque. Rattlesnakes move tailes left to right but this is at the terminus not up the vertebrae. Lizard tails that are funtional tend to move left and right but not up and down as this pic presents.I think it is supposed to be two mammals interacting instead.

For a list of some of the fanciful critters of the period, look here.And here is a similar critter.A key point to remember, if you have ever spent time looking through bestiaries, is that fancy ran wild. Look at this creature, and note the fish legs.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I wouldn't expect that there was an entire fossil to work with - say, maybe a neck and head, and the artist used analogy to known animals to make his illustration.

doubleEdited by anastasia, : No reason given.

Can I ask you or anyone a little lay person's question?How likely is it, even given an entire skeleton, that an artist would depict the living creature as in this engraving? Would/could there be hair or other guesses? Why would it not be portrayed more like a dragon?Also , if dragons were some representation of fossils found, why are they similarly hairless and scaled?If these pictures were of dinosaurs, wouldn't it seem that the artists imaginations were using something more than only bones? Or just a lucky guess?

I can't tell from the artwork in the OP whether the thing was hairy or not - certainly not shaggy, but cow-like hair is entirely possible. And dragon illustrations come in a lot of variety, though I can't say I've seen a fur-bearing one. Some old art shows them apparently without scales, though.

I'm not sure what's going on there, or why the beast's back doesn't seem to be drawn in. I'd like to see another photograph --- AiG have some, but their website isn't working. (Honestly, I sacrifice goats, I pray to Beelzebub, and then when their website does finally go down I want to look at it --- there's no justice, is there?)Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I love the cute little wyvern.

As a side item, here is one reason for the lovely folk of AiG to stop claiming that dinosaurs were roaming through Europe during medieval times.Bernard of Clairvaux died in the 12th century.

From the link: Must be where politicians got the idea of crapping on the electorate. :-p