24-03-2018, 04:30 PM
(24-03-2018, 04:57 AM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(24-03-2018, 12:08 AM)Morten St. George wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....The animal depicted on page 80v shows no signs of having a very long tail and consequently is far more likely to be an armadillo than a pangolin....
That statement doesn't hold water in the context of medieval critter drawings. Someone else will say: "An armadillo has plates and a pangolin has scales, so it's much more likely to be a pangolin" and another person will come along and say it's a bumpy-wooled ram (there are bumpy-wool varieties of sheep), so it's more likely to be a ram than a pangolin or armadillo".
I've already linked my blog on how medieval illustrators drew animals, but in case you didn't read it, here it is again.
You really should look at the pictures before you interpret the "pangolin/armadillo/sheep/aardvark" critter too literally:
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There are also threads on this forum investigating the little dragony critter that's nibbling or smelling a leaf. There's no agreement at all on either this critter or the "pangolin" critter even after very capable researchers spent months collecting medieval drawings and discussing them.
There can be no justification for the outright rejection of a well-drawn armadillo in favor of a badly-drawn something else.
The distance from northern Italy to the nearest natural habitat of the pangolin is roughly three thousand miles. Chances are greater that a group of naked female Europeans could have crossed the Atlantic undetected than having crossed the Islamic world to reach the pangolins undetected.
One way to settle the issue is to show the VMS drawing along with photographs of the armadillo, pangolin, and all the other animals you mentioned, to unbiased people, such as young children, and ask them to identify the animal. I'd be willing to bet that all or nearly all of them would pick the armadillo.
Let me clarify that I am not categorically stating that this VMS animal has to be an armadillo. I am only saying that it could be an armadillo and therefore constitutes one more piece of evidence pointing to authorship of the VMS in the New World.