The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Koen G]

Rich, a couple of posts ago, you write: 

In my opinion, the pangolin is "out" because it has a much fatter tail than the armadillo, and seems more to graduate from that animal's body shape, rather than be an appendage. [...] a pangolin has fat legs with scales, much wider tail as part of the body at the top, the ears of a pangolin do not stand up, and are not pointy, and the scales are larger.

That's comparing the creatures to photographs or early modern scientific drawings of the animals. Slider way up. But the the slider is turned down again in order to ignore the fact that armadillos have plates and bands instead of fish scales, and that the supposed scales are on backwards. And that this artist draws animals' hind legs either almost unarticulated, or bending the wrong way like in the case of the bulls. 

As others have shown, medieval books have other creatures like this. Hard to identify monsters that kind of look like armadillos or whatnot. So what I'm saying is that its a bad drawing, and if one's argument is based on modern or early-modern images or even careful observation of nature, that's messing with the slider.