(no subject)
" Year: 1572
Scientist: J. Sluperius
Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Believe it or not, the animal that inspired this hideous depiction is a gentle vegetarian: the elephant. This 16th-century engraving of a cyclops kept alive a myth that started thousands of years before, when ancient Greeks assumed the big skulls they found must have belong to giants, and the median nasal openings must have been single eye sockets."
http://www.strangescience.net/goof.htm for even more weird stuff mostly from the 16th-19th century. It'd be way too huge if I were to post it all, but it's definitely worth a look so far as weird history goes.