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Page 2
Despite its failure to conform to any of the public's expectations of sirens, this horrid little mummy was such a sensation that numerous "counterfeit" mer-creatures, each presented as Barnum's original, have surfaced since. The Fiji Mermaid was the focus of "Humbug", an episode of the popular 'X-Files' T.V. show. A close relative of this type of "mermaid" is the "alligator boy", a popular American sideshow exhibit created, as you might expect, from a primate's upper quarters and an alligator's nether ones.
Some of the best-known feats of creative taxidermy are not so much attempts to fool the observer as jokes or spoofs on the concept of the home-made chimera itself. This practice is most common in North America, where stuffed and mounted versions of the Jackelope (also spelled "Jackalope"), a fierce, antlered rabbit or hare, and the fur-bearing trout, whose fur is actually that of another rabbit, are among the popular taxidermied conversation pieces to be found in roadside taverns.
Works of creative taxidermy have figured so frequently in the historical search for fabulous creatures that it is of little wonder that Northern-Hemisphere residents were more than a little skeptical when stuffed or dried examples of such real-life oddities as the duck-billed platypus were brought to them for examination. However, some attempts to mimic or create traditional monsters have gone beyond taxidermy, attempting to simulate live versions of the beasts.
Although circuses and roadside museums have employed many types of apparatus and illusion to create "live mythicals", as well as attempting to pass animal abnormalities, such as a gila monster or snake with a severely curved or humped back, as monsters, one of the best-known created mythicals was made in response to scientific query rather than in the interest of showmanship.
In 1933, Dr. W. Franklin Dove1 performed an operation which moved the two horn-buds of a bull toward the centere of the skull, where they merged into a single horn, resulting in a unicorn of sorts. This demonstrated that the claim that a cloven-hoofed animal was physically incapable of producing a single horn, asserted by French palentologist Baron G.L. Cuvier in 1827, was wrong, and that the unicorn could theoretically exist.
The copyright of the article The Monster Makers: Jenny Hanivers and Other Fabricated Monsters - Page 2 in Monster Legends is owned by Sarah Davis. Permission to republish The Monster Makers: Jenny Hanivers and Other Fabricated Monsters - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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