It was one of my favorite middle school toys. Now keep in mind I grew up in the middle of the

1980s so there were a lot of favorites to pick from. Transformers G.I. Joe, Mask, and He-Man, all the classics you'd expect, and of course, the always popular

Lego. Sadly, I don't remember what this toy was called, but I can describe it. It was a tray that held three pieces of

plastic that combined to form one larger plate and on each of them were raised drawings.

The full set had a number of complete drawings of

fantastic creatures, but the plates had been split into top, middle, and lower

thirds, allowing kids to mix and match them. Want the feet of a bear but the torso of a dragon and a human head?

Just find the pieces and put them together.

And when you've built the perfect set, you could place a piece of paper over all of them and rub a cran over the raised

drawings giving you the perfect home-brued coloring page to complete. It's an ancient

fascination really the combination of various parts into an unnatural hybrid.

It's been a feature of the sci-fi genre for nearly a century and a half, too, showing up in early

hits like The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells and modern blockbusters like

Guardians of the Galaxy, volume 3.

It seems that we will never get tired of remixing the world around us.

As you'd expect, this hasn't always been done for pure entertainment.

In a world before photography and instant global publishing, news traveled glacially slow,

giving it the chance to shift and change over time.

One whispered story of a mysterious animal could easily become a larger-than-life legend of

a monster that most people were only too happy to believe.

Of course, believability isn't the same thing as truth, but throughout history,

folklore has put a handful of creatures on the map that represent the opposite problem.

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