W<\/span>ilderness land was far more abundant in the Middle Ages than it is now. If you moved 80% of humans to another planet (along with their houses, roads, schools, and offices) and then spread the remaining 20% over the entire globe, that is how the planet was populated in the year 1400.<\/p>\n There was much more undeveloped land and contact with animals in those days. Most people lived on or near farms. Milk came from a cow or goat, not from a supermarket. Pigs and pigeons were purchased in the marketplace and slaughtered right there in the stall or in the back yard at home. A “taxi” was a horse, donkey, or ox-cart. Animals were everywhere\u2014a king with bow and arrow could shoot hundreds in a single day without straying far from the castle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A<\/span>nd yet medieval illustrations of animals are weird\u2014cows look like horses, ants look like bears, and reptiles\/amphibians look like dinosaurs.<\/p>\n There are a number of possible explanations for this…<\/p>\n But enough background… let’s look at some pictures. Here are some medieval critters that might make you smile. The first one is the leucrota<\/em>:<\/p>\n Leucrota images courtesy of the Kongelige Bibliotek (lower left),\u00a0Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France (lower right), and the British Library.<\/p><\/div>\n The leucrota was believed to be a cross between a lion and a crocotta (a “dog-wolf”), with hind-quarters like a deer. The drawing top-left somewhat conveys this idea, it has claws and a more lion-like mane, but the drawings top-right scarcely resemble the offspring of a dog-wolf and lion\u2014they have the head of a horse and the feet of a deer, and the bottom one looks like a cross between a sheep and a deer. The leucrota in Ms Bodley 533<\/em> doesn’t even resemble the images above, it looks like an angry sheep.<\/p>\n The only feature the various leucrota have in common is the distinctive long grin.<\/p>\n The leucrota isn’t necessarily mythical. It is sometimes described as a cross between a lion and a hyena, which may originally have been an attempt to describe a different species of hyena. The brown hyena (right) is quite a bit larger and furrier than the more familiar spotted hyena:<\/p>\n Left; Spotted hyena with mane, stubby tail, and fearsome grin, courtesy of PBS.org Animal Guide. Right: Brown hyena, which is quite a bit larger than other hyenas, and may have inspired descriptions of the “leucrota” (described as a cross between a lion and a wolf-dog (hyena). Image courtesy of Bernard Dupont on Wikipedia.).<\/p><\/div>\n If you look at the individual features of the leucrota in medieval drawings, the features seem a little less strange\u2014the hyena is a doglike animal with a mane like a horse, the aggressive temperament of a lion, a moderately short tail used for signaling (like a deer), long legs with hoof-like paws, and a ferocious toothy jaw<\/a>. In a way, medieval drawings are descriptive of individual parts even if the overall composition goes slightly awry.<\/p>\n Note that the drawing of a hyena in the manuscript below-left is more realistic. The illustrators of Arabic manuscripts lived closer to hyenas than those in central and northern Europe and were more likely to have seen them. Northerners tended to stylize or completely fictionalize the animal.<\/p>\n The hyena is both predator and scavenger. Its scavenging instincts were often expressed by drawing the animal stealing a corpse (bottom-right). Once the meme of the corpse-stealer became familiar, the illustrator could take liberties with the way the animal was drawn. Visual memes and attributes served as visual memory aids:<\/p>\n Left: a more naturalistic rendition of the hyena in an Arabic manuscript. Right: A stylized version of a hyena-monster desecrating a grave and stealing a corpse, a reference to the hyena’s scavenging habits.<\/p><\/div>\n In a previous blog about castorum<\/a>, I included drawings of beavers that are quite fanciful, and here is one of my favorite drawings… ants that look like dogs and bears, from Cotton Vitellius A XV:<\/em><\/p>\n Equally strange are medieval drawings of crocodiles.<\/p>\n The smile of the crocodile is similar to the hyena’s toothy grin, but that’s where the resemblance ends. The medieval crocodile is sometimes drawn like a fish, sometimes like a lion, giant dog, monkey, or furry hedgehog, and sometimes like a basilisk, dragon, or dinosaur. There are even some that look like leucrotas.<\/p>\n The only way we know for sure it’s a crocodile is because it says so in the text, in combination with familiar legends, such as the crocodile eating a man (and crying crocodile tears after doing so), and the crocodile being outfoxed by the hydra.<\/p>\n There are several medieval crocodiles that look like monkeys, and one of them is slightly more reptilian than the others, but even it has a primate face rather than a reptile face. There is also one that looks more like a human-faced lion than any kind of reptile:<\/p>\n The crocodile carving on the wall of Chichester Cathedral (c. 1330) looks like a big fat beagle with a somewhat human face. You would never guess it was a crocodile.<\/p>\n There are many crocodiles drawn like mammals, I couldn’t fit them all, but the examples above should be enough to get the idea across\u2014you can’t tell what they are just by looking at them.<\/p>\n Voynich researchers are probably wondering how lizards and amphibians are drawn because the VMS Scorpius<\/a> looks more like a reptile\/amphibian than an arthropod.<\/p>\n Sloane 4016<\/em> is a well-known herbal manuscript that includes a brontosaurus-like salamander standing on fat, upright legs (rather than splayed legs), labeled “salamandra”:<\/p>\n Here’s an even more extreme example from Montpellier H 437:<\/em><\/p>\n This might look like kangaroo road-kill but it’s clearly labeled “salamandre” [Montpellier H 437].<\/p><\/div>The giant dog-kangaroo in H 437 is labeled “salamandre” (salamander) and has the “fire salamander” flames to confirm that the text and image are in synch with one another.<\/p>\n The following illustration of the elements in Biblioteca de Catalunya. Ms. 1452<\/em> (based on Ramon Lull’s 13th-century astronomy\/astrology) makes this association between fire and salamanders even more explicit. In this diagram, earth is represented by a man working the soil, water is a trio of fish, air is a peacock (which ironically can’t fly very well and rarely takes to the air), and fire is a salamander that looks more like a scorpion than an amphibian with the deeply curved tail and extra legs, but is clearly labeled “mandrina” which is short for “salamandrina”\u2014an amphibian:<\/p>\n Crocodiles and lizards are reptiles and the drawing of Scorpius in the VMS and a number of other manuscripts that include zodiac symbols are drawn as reptiles\/amphibians, dragons, turtles, and frogs. Here is version 1.1 of a map I created of the zodiac symbols that most closely resemble the reptilian creature in the VMS (originally posted on my 2016 blog<\/a> about Scorpius symbols):<\/p>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/LeucrotaExamples.png\")
<\/a><\/a>Using Props to Tell the Story<\/h4>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/h4>\nIt’s a Croc<\/h4>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nWhat about lizards and salamanders?<\/h4>\n
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