Fire-Breathing Dragon from Mundus Subterraneus

This black-and-white print shows a side view of a dragon with a scaled body, short legs ending in clawed feet, and two large, fan-like wings rising from its back. Its long, serpent-like neck is arched, and its head features small horns and an open mouth emitting a dense, radiating plume of fire. The tail curves upwards at the end, and the creature’s body is covered in textured, overlapping scales.

This image appears in Athanasius Kircher's 'Mundus Subterraneus' (1665), a foundational work of early modern natural philosophy that attempted to map the subterranean world, including fossils and spontaneous generation of creatures, which Kircher often classified alongside mythological beings.