The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[asteckley]

Those are a lot of words to say nothing more than that you don't think the drawing looks enough like an armadillo to count for much.

This is not a fair summary of my position, nor what I said!

Well, if there is anything you said that doesn't distill down to that, then it doesn't come through.  Perhaps in your last sentence?  ...where you say you think the focus on the beast on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. obscures things like research into clothing styles? That was outside of my summary, so I guess that was unfair.  

But I'm also not sure what you mean by "obscures" -- perhaps that was not quite the right word you meant to use. Are you saying that consideration of evidence, like this drawing, that might be detrimental to a particular theory is only distracting everyone from focusing on other evidence that might be more favorable to it, and it should therefore be disregarded or abandoned?  I guess that would make sense if the drawing being confirmed as an armadillo only hinted at trouble the 1420 theory. But it wouldn’t be mild trouble: it would be a direct problem that the current theory can’t really explain.

I agree that it’s unlikely there will be a single “silver bullet” observation that settles the identification beyond doubt, although it’s not impossible. And I’ll admit I’ve swung back and forth a lot on how strong the evidence is for vs. against the armadillo reading. The most recent argument I’ve seen, which I reposted above —Koen’s point about similar scale-like markings appearing on other, clearly non-scale animals—goes a long way, in my view, toward making the non-armadillo interpretation more plausible, even if the first impression still strongly suggests “armadillo.”