A collection of fanciful beasts on old maps, presented in a slide show by Slate, addresses the famous phrase denoting the edge of the known world: "Hic sunt dracones," or, "Here be dragons":

It’s a common belief that “Here be dragons” was a typical inscription on old maps. In fact, the Latin equivalent, Hic sunt dracones, has been found only once, on the 16th-century Lenox Globe, and the first scholar to study the globe, one B.F. da  Costa, opined in 1879 that it referred not to mythical dragons at all,  but to the “Dagroians”—a bloodthirsty Sumatran tribe described by Marco  Polo. The phrase may have entered the public consciousness via the writer Dorothy Sayers, who used it in one of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.