Talk:Sea goat

Removing dubious mythology material ("Pricus" and Chronos)

I'm removing material from this article, and the equivalent at Capricornus. The text in question was added to Capricornus a couple years ago [1] and mostly copied over to sea goat when the article was made earlier this year. I suspect it to be unreliable for the following reasons:

• The sites linked don't look like particularly reliable sources, and don't cite any sources at all themselves. One of them [2] presents the story as a "lost legend" and a linked page [3] refers to the story being "discovered in later writings," but with no specifics or sources. An earlier version of the page [4] attributes it to a text called the "Scriptures of Delphi" [5]. I can find nothing that looks reliable about these scriptures, which also include a "Vampire Bible," and the current version of the Gods and Monsters page about them is more skeptical [6].
• I can't find any reference to a sea goat named "Pricus" on Google Books, except an encyclopedia of mythical creatures that appears quite recent [7]. The name Pricus does appear elsewhere, but only as a human name or as part of a taxonomic name (and some OCR errors).
• Nor can I find references to Chronos creating or fathering a sea goat.
• These studies of constellation myths discuss Capricorn in some detail but say nothing about "Pricus", Chronos (including variant spellings), time reversal, or a whole species of sea goats that became land goats [8] [9]
• The concept of "turning back time" seems very modern and unfitting to Greek mythology (though I admit this is largely my intuition and could be wrong, and I would welcome any corrections). I can't find a reference to Chronos having that specific power in myth, either.

I think it'd be wise to search through other Greek mythology-related pages, such as the topics mentioned here [10] for any other dubiously sourced material. And the same for vampire-related pages, possibly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.74.64.13 (talk) 20:41, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Bit of a mess

This article is a bit of a mess. It should concentrate on the sea goat or goat fish rather than on one representation that of the constellation Capricornus. The source on Mesopotamian traditions by John Rogers (Rogers, John H. (1998). "Origins of the ancient constellations: I. The Mesopotamian traditions". Journal of the British Astronomical Association. 108: 9–28. Bibcode:1998JBAA..108....9R.) on pages 12, 15 has a drawing of a Mesopotamian goat-fish as part of a larger drawing (the drawing is copyrighted so can't be grabbed for this article though I did find another picture from the Louvre of Elamite goat-fish which was already in wikimedia commons). I note the entry on Hippocampus has some info on the sea goat also. In addition some more modern depictions such as the 18th century Venus Reclining on a Sea Monster by John Deare (https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/107VRV public domain picture according to the owner not yet in wikimedia commons). It might also have been used in heraldry. Erp (talk) 05:34, 22 June 2024 (UTC)