The boa is designed as a spiral coiled lizard, with wings and feet. The jaculus, which is a snake that flies from trees, is shown as a lifeless stick.
Text Translation:
Of the snake called boas. The boas is a snake found in Italy; it is of a vast weight; it follows flocks of cattle and of gazelles, fastens on their udders when they are full of milk and sucking on these, kills the animals; from its ravaging of oxen, bos, it has got its name boas. Of the iaculus fly’ (Pharsalia, 9, 720). For they spring into trees and when anything comes their way, throw themselves on it and kill it. As a result, they are called iaculi, ‘javelin-snakes’.
Folio 69r – the ydrus, continued. De boa angue; Of the snake called boas.
Again, and I must stress this, that’s not how this works! That not how any of this works!
@#1: LOL! Yeah, no kidding… I have had people in this day and age tell me that milk snakes suck milk out of cows. I explain to them that snakes don’t have fleshy lips and a fleshy tongue like we do: Go ahead, I’ll say, see if you can suck liquid up a straw with just your teeth. Uh huh. Never works.
The snakes are in the milk room because they are attracted to feed on the mice, which are there for the spilt feed fed to the cattle as they are milked. It’s funny how people keep thinking that snakes are sucking milk out of cows, just because they see them around the dairy.
Which is just a start, of course.
It’s truly amazing just how hard it is to kill off some very old beliefs.
Unrelated: someone posed their anaconda wrapped around a bunch of hamburger rolls and captioned it “this anaconda’s got buns, hun.”
The whole series is a very interesting mixture of art and sillyness.
Thank you very much for sharing these.
I wonder, what the artists thought of the animals they painted.
I love that depiction of the boa; one day, I want to do that, huge, on a quilt, just because it’s so damn wacked out.
The thing that always springs to mind with boa constrictors for me is that they are the only (?) animal we all commonly know by its zoological name -- via the Stephen Fry (now Sandy Toskvig) QI quiz comedy show.