Dragons, Dogs & Amadillos?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

clearly the drawing is not an accurate representation of a living creature, and we cannot deduce which species was intended by comparing the critter to living creatures.

Indeed.  As you say, to get a match one must choose which details are to be trusted and which are to be ignored as errors.

But that applies to every image in the VMS.

So I understand why some people just hate the Retracing Theory, and the Herbal Plants Are Some Bits Copied From A Sketch From The Author With The Rest Made Up By The Scribe Theory.   Because they greatly increase the uncertainty about which details can be wrong, and how big the errors may be.  The latter, in particular, pretty much makes all plant matching efforts futile.

Take f9v, for example.  I am convinced that this plant is one of two or three that can be identified with certainty -- as the pansy, Viola tricolor.  Not just for the shape of the flowers (which, however, are upside down -- put that into my "ignore this" bag) but mainly because of the way the shape of the leaves changes from bottom to top.  I believe this match is more certain than Centaurea for f2r, or any other proposal I have seen.  

But do I think that the text is about Viola tricolor? No.  I suspect that the only part of this figure that was based on the Author's draft is the root, that is totally unremarkable and hence unidentifiable.  I bet that the Scribe filled everything else either from a real pansy plant that he plucked from his garden, or from some Herbal that happened to depict that plant true to nature.  The Scribe, and quite probably the Author too, had no idea of what the rest of the fochor oporody plant actually looked like...

All the best, --stolfi