Show a modern reader a photograph of a manatee and few will shout, ‘Mermaid!’ Its bulky gray body and wrinkled skin look nothing like the beautiful sea-woman of popular culture. But sailors centuries ago did not examine wildlife through high-resolution…
In Ukrainian villages, rusalkas (Mermaids) were not usually described as fairy-tale women with fish tails. In Polissia they were said to appear in rye fields, near forests, on meadows and by rivers. Some communities even performed rituals to symbolically ‘see…
The modern mermaid seems easy to define: a woman above the waist, a fish tail below, long hair and an ability to live in water. If such creatures formed a real biological species, we would expect bodies, skeletons, DNA or…