Sea serpents

Sea Serpent

A sea serpent from Olaus Magnus's book History of the Northern Peoples (1555).
Grouping	Legendary Creature
Sub grouping	Sea monster
Other name(s)	Worm, wyrm, cetus
Country	Various
Habitat	Sea

A sea serpent or sea dragon is a type of dragon described in various mythologies (most notably Greek {Cetus, Echidna, Hydra, Scylla}, Mesopotamian {Tiamat}, Hebrew {Leviathan} and Norse {Jormungard}).

The "Drachenkampf" mytheme, the chief god in the role of the hero slaying a sea serpent, is widespread both in the Ancient Near East and in Indo-European mythology, e.g. Lotan and Hadad, Leviathan and Yahweh, Tiamat and Marduk (see also Labbu, Bašmu, Mušḫuššu), Illuyanka and Tarhunt, etc. The Hebrew Bible also has less mythological descriptions of large sea creatures as part of creation under God's command, such as the Tannin mentioned in Book of Genesis 1:21 and the "great serpent" of Amos 9:3. In the Aeneid, a pair of sea serpents killed Laocoön and his sons when Laocoön argued against bringing the Trojan Horse into Troy.

In antiquity and in the bible, dragons were imagined as huge serpentine monsters, which means that the image of a fire-breathing dragon with four/two legs and wings came much later—in the late Middle Ages; Most of stories say that they live in the sea, the Babylonian myths of Tiamat, the myth of the Hydra, Scylla, Cetus and Echidna in the Greek mythology and maybe even the Leviathan, confirm that.