Got any fun bits of dragon, serpent, or reptile mythology you'd like to share?
Have you seen this image before?
You probably have! It’s all over the internet as a vintage illustration of a “tatzelwurm”. Search for tatzelwurm in tumblr and this will be one of the top hits. And everyone knows that a tatzelwurm is a two-legged cat-headed snake, right?
Well, no. This is not a tatzelwurm.
This image, which circulates widely without credit, is in fact the back of the July 4, 1954 issue of Domenica del Corriere, a popular Italian periodical.
And it shows a monster with the head of a cat, body of a snake, and two forelegs attacking livestock in Fiumefreddo, Sicily.
Nowhere is it given a name. And Sicily is quite far away from the tatzelwurm’s habitat in the German Alps. So it’s not a tatzelwurm, it’s a nameless cat-headed two-legged snake monster from Sicily. A serpente gatto, if you will.
Where did it come from? Who knows? For all I know it could have been a practical joke by the newspaper. I do know that the image has spread far and wide through the cryptozoology grapevine. To their credit, some play coy about it (“could this have been a tatzelwurm???”), but online it gets posted as a tatzelwurm.
And tatzelwurms are not necessarily cat-headed snakes either! In fact they’ve historically been conventional dragons. The dispersal of the Fiumefreddo creature, along with the human tendency to put things in easily sortable artificial groups (cat head? two legs? tatzelwurm!) and the cryptozoological imperative to create a world where cat-headed snakes are real, crystallized the cat-headed two-legged snake as the tatzelwurm.
