Scytho-Sarmatian Sea Monsters from the Ukraine

Following up on some recent postings on Scythians, Sarmations and the reality of Amazons on another blog, I have some illustrations left over relating to Water Monsters in Scythian and Sarmatian culture"Dolphin" but it is one that shows strikingly UN-dolphinlike features of the head and pectoral fins. I have always thought that in such depictions, the artist is really thinking of Beluga sturgeon.I believe that there are some very old Indo-European words which were ancestral to later "Whale" and "Dolphin" names such as the Greek Ketos (Cetus) but that the original reference was to Beluga sturgeonians, Sarmations and Proto-Indo-Europeans, this geographically relates to the modern Ukraine (Southern Russia)

A Water Horse or Hippocampus. this case once again I think this is based on a swimming moose: the forefoot in the middle seems to have cloven hoofs and I am thinking the "Rear Fin" represents a hind leg, also with a cloven hoof. unning "Minimal Seamonster" statistics in the "Longnecked" and "Waterhorse" categories and I was very surprised to find that the smallest-ize category of reports are describing a creature consistently between ten and fifteen feet long, sometimes as much as twenty feet long, but with a head and neck estimated as only four to six feet long, with a head two or three feet long-the whole creature very hoselike and with the head the size of a horse, and typically with one or two humps on the back. This minimum dimensions sighting is reported in Europe, Asia and North America, and offshore out to sea only slightly, and the dimensions match those of a moose (Elk) within a reasonable margin for error. This also matches the corresponding sightings on land, such as at Loch Ness up to 1934.

The Sarmatians were famous for using a dragon military standard that was a sort of an ornamental head with an attached wind sock. In this case the head is distinctively crocodylian and I can only surmise it depicts a Medcroc in the Black Sea end of the range (Historical reports from Turkey require that the crocs  entered the rivers via the Black Sea) and that the jagged comb on top of the head means to illustrate the ridge on its back and tail. This is nothing to do with the Pskov crocodiles as a Cryptid category, Pskov is in NORTH Russia.