Nagas, Plesiosaurs and Rainbow Serpents

 

Nagas are the South Asian (Indian and Indonesian) equivalents of Dragons, and the name "Naga" simply means "Snake", In Indonesia the Nagas tend to be a very peculiar sort of snake with a distinct neck; shoulders with forefins, wings or legs; a short thick torso tapering down into what looks like a distinct tail also. In more elaborate depictions they are shown with several loops in the water following the head and neck in typical "Sea-Serpent" style. The range of size in depicted Nagas is very great, from less than human size (three feet?) to a very great size, perhaps over fifty feet long.

 

 

 

 I had seen a similar pattern to this Suma Islands textile [below] before from the Phillipines before but I did not have a photo for it. It occurred to me that the creature on the other textile had a body plan like a Plesiosaur. One of the styles of depiction on the other cloth had an enlarged "Snake Head" and this one has "Devil Heads" instead. at any rate, the heads are mostly symbolic, the important thing is that the depictions are not showing ordinary crocodiles but something different.

(The lizards shown in the center are possibly very large and unclassified monitor lizards)

 

Cast of a Plesiosaur fossil, to show the similar body plan.

 

The two Batak carved wooden panels below show something like the local version of the Tao-tieh (Taotie) Chinese dragon head and once again it seems that the spiral design behind the eyes represents the Euryapsid skull openings that Plesiosaurs have (but that snakes do not have) The pineal 'eye' may also be intended by thesmall diamond shape above the eyes but situated medially: the boxed-off area in front of the eyes may indicate the area where the nostrils are located.

It turns out that in Northern Australia the Rainbow Snake (also known in Southern India) is a local variation on the Naga design. I am borrowing the logo of the Aboriginal Northern Land Council (This is not meant in any way to be disrespectful, I just needed to illustrate the design). Compare to the body plan of the first Indonesian Naga at the top of this article. An earlier blog noted the comparison of the Rainbow Serpent's teeth to PLesiosaur teeth: I did not make the comparison myself but it is also a good argument.

And finally it seems that the Nagas of Indonesia carry over intio New Guinea and Melanesia, where some of the native names sound as if they are variations of "Naga" and "Naga Raja" (King-of-Serpents) in the sield below, the Naga is shown in an ambiguous way, either as the top half done X-ray style with the throat indicated from the mouth down and then a schematic herart (The curlicues at the ends of the jaws is a design also known from Indonesia) and then as the top half, showing the twi foreflippers in the same manner as the Rotomahana sighting off New Zealand in the 1800s: and it is also a stlyised profile with both head and tail ends up, and indicating both fore and rear flippers.

 The catline face at the top of the shield is also interesting and I wonder if there are local reports of "Phantom panthers" to go along with the catfaced design?

Here is a comparison of a Plesiosaur reconstruction by National Geographic

to compare to the "Winged Foreflippers" top-part sighting design.

 Such sightings are infrequent but have been recorded in the Baltic sea, in the North

Atlantic, near New Zealand, off the US East Coast, off the US West Coast and near Japan.

Taotie (Tao T'ieh) Dragon Faces

[Taotie on a ding bronze vessel from late Shang era]

Taotie
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Taotie (Chinese: 饕餮; pinyin: tāotiè; Japanese: tōtetsu, sometimes translated as a gluttonous ogre mask) is a motif commonly found on ritual bronze vessels from the Shang and Zhou Dynasty. The design typically consists of a zoomorphic mask, described as being frontal, bilaterally symmetrical, with a pair of raised eyes and typically no lower jaw area. Some argue that the design can be traced back to Neolithic jades of the ancient Yangtze River Liangzhu culture (3310–2250 BCE).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taotie

Taotie (Or Tao-T'ieh as it used to be commonly spelled) was an important symbol back at the beginning of Chinese civilisation but as time went by the opriginal meaning got lost. different interpretations of the mask were done artistically and different stories were attached to it It was said to be a glutton and to try to eat people, to do them great harm by trying to eat them but afterwards the bodies were passed through intact. Some versions of the Dragon or Ogre face are shown holding a human head in the mouth. The Taotie is said to be one of the "Children of the Dragon" and to have an affinity to water (All mentioned in the Wikipedia entry)


Taotie jug with Dragon handle.

















Muraenosaurus, a well-preserved long-necked Plesiosaur, from a Chinese-language site (Pasteup with views of its skull as arranged by me)




Jade Taotie rubbed with red cinnabar for colouring. My interpretation is that the Taotie mask basically shows the top of a short-snouted longnecked Plesiosaur's skull, with the eye sockets in the appropriate place and the Euryapsid openings in the back of the skull behind the eyes.






Muraenosaurus skull in a different orientation for a better comparison. The Taoties also sometimes exaggerate "Horns" at the back of the skull and some later versions can look like tigers with water buffalo horns. I am fairly certain after looking over several of the older designs that the back of the head means ONLY to show the Euryapsid openings. Some Taoties do also seem to indicate the "Third eye" opening as well (between the eye sockets and the Euryapsid openings on the diagram)






And of course the lower jaw is not seen in this position and can rightly be left off: some of the older designs also show the sides of the head "Unrolled" to the sides and thus making a broader mask area, including the sides and two views of the lower jaw in that way. The illustration which begins this entry is of such a type. The design is similar to several Northwest-coast American designs and particularly to depictions of the Sea-serpent Sisutl (suspected separately as representing a Plesiosaur-shaped creature) Some rather basic "Dragon" designs are associated with Taoties (as an example in the bronze jug handle above, top images on this page from Wikipedia) and sometimes incorporated into the design.


The later Chinese dragons are basically composite creatures based on a typically lizardlike design (see "The Real Dragons", one of the first entries on the Frontiers of Zoology blog) However, one recognisable component has always been a Longnecked lake (River) monster with a mane and a jagged crest all the way down the middle of its back. The Dragon's face still retains features of a Taotie mask and the representations are probably related (see at bottom)

As it is, there is probably still too strong an influence of swimming moose (red deer stag) in the depiction of the head, probably from Chinese chroniclers including those "Water Horse" reports in with the others in the database (Most Cryptozoologists are still doing that with most Water Monster reports worldwide) However in this Lung depiction, the body proportions can be seen as head and neck, body, and tail assumed to be about equal thirds of the long "Sea-serpent" body (There should actually be a central thickened part to the body and some "Dragon turtle" reports provide that) The limbs at first look nothing like Plesiosaur flippers but the description provides the detail that there are "Tiger Paws" in the middle (red here) before going on to the long "Claws" [=digits or fingers] of the limb skeleton. Astonishingly, this matches the description of a Plesiosaur's limb bones although the artists could never figure out what this meant. See the earlier FOZ Blog entry from April:
http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/04/cfz-blog-on-plesiosaurian-taniwhas.html