Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Morten, the four-legged scorpions from England are different from the VMS "scorpion".

I would not rule out the possibility that the VMS authors created an original design for the scorpion, possibly influenced by earlier depictions of dragons. Some of their zodiac images are traditional, so they apparently knew what a real scorpion looked like but did not want to use it.

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Sigh. It appears you didn't look at my links or you would never have posted that statement.

If you had, you would see that VMS Scorpius is not original. There are also sculptures that are based on the same idea but I couldn't post them because I couldn't find any photos of them that were public domain or otherwise postable, but even so, on the maps it is clear that the VMS Scorpius follows a minor "lizard/dinosaur-style" tradition specific to its time.