The Arzamas Monster

One of the most bizarre monsters to ever fall from the sky was about to plummet from the heavens as thunder raged over the Russian city of Arzamas. Violent stormclouds had gathered over the city on June 4, 1719 - and they seemed to be gearing up to spit out a reptilian monstrosity that could only be described as a dragon...

## Peter's Dragon

The winged aberration crashed to the ground near a fortress, whereupon it quickly attracted the attention of local officials. These officials - including one Zemsky Commissar Vasily Shlykov - carefully measured and described the creature after remembering the orders of Emperor Peter the Great pertaining to actions that should be taken if any monster or freak of nature was discovered. You see, Peter had recently established the Kunstkamera, the first museum to ever open in Russia, and was in the business of collecting monsters and oddities for his collection. The decree in question went something like this:

'*If anyone finds any curiosity, monster or freak, heavenly stone etc, immediately send it to the Kunstkamera in Saint Petersburg - because it's not from the devil, but from nature*'

I say 'something like' because there are two slightly different translations of this decree on two different websites, and I've tried to find the original one but have failed to do so within enough haste to make this article in a realistic timeframe. I've sort-of combined the two different translations into something which makes the most sense. Anyway - back to the story.

The officials measured it to be ten arshins and five inches from head to tail, with the tail alone being four arshins and five inches long. The wings were slightly shorter than the body - and were said to be nine arshins and ten inches long. Obviously nowadays most laymen don't know what an arshin is, and I must admit that I didn't until I started researching for this article. Arshins are an obsolete Russian unit of measurement, also known as the 'Russian Cubit'. The exact calculations to work out their modern equivalents are very fiddly, but luckily for us one of the sources provided a modern translation. The body of the creature was 7.5 meters long, the wings were 7 meters long from their tips to the ridge on the back of the animal, and the tail was 3 meters.

The dragon's teeth were apparently comparable to those of a pike, and were 9 centimeters long. Its wings were recorded as being bat-like. All illustrations of and discussions about the entity seem to demonstrate that it had a sail on its back, but I can't find proper documentation for this. I see no reason why this detail would be completely invented and then focused on, and so I'm assuming that it did indeed possess such a structure. The legs were described as having smooth skin and talons like an eagle's, but longer - and it also apparently had four-fingered claws on its wings as well. Obviously the animal was dead, but its faded eyes were still described as being very fierce. The creature's carcass was swiftly preserved in a barrel and sent to the Kunstkamera, but this this amazing discovery was sadly lost on the way to the museum, as is often the case in these sorts of stories...

## What, Why, Wyrm

Okay so that was a bizarre tale. Another researcher, who wasn't named in the source article, apparently spoke to the director of the museum of local history in Arzamas - Tatyana Ilchenko - and she said that the document that originally spoke of the dragon's capture did indeed exist. She admitted that it left her with '*more questions than answers*', and she eventually speculated that it could've been an extant dinosaur that was blown into the city by the winds of the hurricane. Lilia Heydarovna - an employee at the 'World of Dinosaurs' exhibit also visited by this unknown researcher - noted that the prehistoric synapsid known as Dimetrodon matches the description of the Arzamas Monster the best - seeing as it is roughly the same length and had a large sail on its back. However, Dimetrodon had no wings, and so she suggested that perhaps it was an emaciated specimen with flaps of skin hanging off the sides of its body. I'm not convinced.

## Sources

This page on Fantastic Beings Wiki (a Russian cryptozoology site) and this page on Cryptid Wiki. The details differ slightly, but this is likely due to simple translation errors.