Spontaneous generations is where animals just appear with out of nowhere, these theories were popular right up to the end of the 19th century, for example rats just appearing where there is corn or maggots just appearing where there is rotting meat. Frogs, worms and salamanders all came from mud and rotting food. There were recipes for creating mice, one of which was to wrap cheese and bread in rags, leave them in a dark corner for several weeks and wholla!! you have mice. Another great recipe for mice was dirty underwear and wheat grain mixed in a bucket and left in the open for 21 days.
Recipe for bees, kill a young bull bury it up-right with its horns sticking out of the ground and after a month or so a swarm of bees will fly out of the corpse. All great stuff really.
It was thought that barnacle geese came from a barnacle called a goose barnacle which is a shell shellfish.
16th century scientist Van Helmount had a recipe for scorpions by placing basil between two bricks and left in sunlight for three weeks then ..... Scorpions.
Luckily biologists and micro biologists through science came to the rescue and were able to prove that mice came from mice, scorpions from scorpions and bees came from bees and so on and so forth. Something we all take for granted today.
There are creationists who believe in the bible quite literary and believe that the world was created only 7000 years ago and all the animals just appeared on the sixth day of creation. There is a huge multimillion dollar museum in Petersburg USA which proposes that humans and dinosaurs lived in harmony side by side (like the Flintstones). The dinosaurs including T-Rex were in fact vegetarians who according to the creationist used their sharp flesh ripping teeth to crack coconuts and crush water melons. “Those crazy guys”.
