These little dragons are dried rays, cut and folded by hand
A Jenny Haniver is a dried ray or skate that has been reshaped by hand to resemble a small dragon or demon, originating from the sixteenth century as a curiosity item. The name is believed to come from the French phrase 'jeune d'Anvers', meaning 'youth of Antwerp', which was later transformed into a woman's name by British sailors. These items were often passed off as basilisks, mythical creatures that could kill with a single glance, making them easy to sell as rare and exotic specimens.
- ▪Jenny Hanivers are made from dried rays or skates that have been cut and folded by hand.
- ▪The earliest known picture of a Jenny Haniver appears in Konrad Gesner's Historia Animalium in 1558.
- ▪In some cultures, such as in Veracruz, Mexico, Jenny Hanivers are believed to possess magical powers and are used in rituals by curanderos.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/04/jenny-haniver.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-04T12:45:44.465Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-04T12:45:44.465Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | MetL-VsPPZOD · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
These little dragons are dried rays, cut and folded by hand Popkin 5:00 am Tue Aug 4, 2026 Jenny Haniver — Didier Descouens / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons) A Jenny Haniver is a dried ray or skate reshaped by hand until it looks like a small dragon or a demon. They go back to the sixteenth century, when sailors and collectors bought them as curiosities. The name may come from jeune d'Anvers, "youth of Antwerp" which British sailors turned into a woman's name. The most common claim was that a Jenny Haniver was a basilisk. A basilisk killed anyone who looked at it, so nobody could say what one actually looked like, which made the fakes easy to pass off. People were still widely afraid of basilisks in the sixteenth century.
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