Apparently, clergymen in the 16th century had a lot of extra time on their hands to masquerade as sea monsters and make their marks on the annals of natural history as sea monks and bishop fish. All this month, we’ve been exploring curious creatures in natural history as part of Page Frights. Today being Halloween, we thought we’d continue the fun by highlighting another “clergyman monster in disguise,” the bishop fish! Earlier this month, we highlighted the ‘sea monk,’ or Piscis monachi habitu (“Fish with the habit of a monk”), a specimen of which was reportedly caught in the seas between Sweden and Denmark in the 1540s.
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