The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

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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.

I absolutely disagree with most of what you wrote there, Koen:

1) "That's comparing the creatures to photographs or early modern scientific drawings of the animals. Slider way up."

How is that my "slider is way up"? If one is trying to identify what animal the person meant to draw, of course anyone would, and everyone does "compare them to photographs or early modern scientific drawings" of them. We do that with any drawing, from any age. It is done by people on both sides of the "forgery fence". It's normal to do. We look at both the drawing and what the animal actually looks like, then count up the similarities and differences.

2) "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."

Well the second thing one does, or should do, after comparing any one illustration to various animals (as in #1, to decide what animal it may be), the second thing would be to see if which illustrations... good or bad illustrations... have the most similar features. In this case, I had already thought the Gesner illustration matched closest to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. animal. And, by the way, one of those features IS the backward scales. It is a good point of comparison. Another is the "fish like" scales, rather than plates, on both.

I didn't draw the Gesner armadillo, nor the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. animal... I have to work with what we all see here, and for me it is a two step process as I've outlined above. There is really no way else to do it: Chose which animal you think the artist wanted to represent, based on number of "hits", then look at other versions of that animal to see if that will tell you anything.

I do understand the difference in our thoughts on this... I know you do a global search of all old drawings... but still, you do compare to images of other animals first. Your excellent analysis of the Zodiac Cancer animals... crayfish or lobsters, rather than crabs... on your site. You knew they were probably meant to be those because it fulfills a constellation symbol. But if they looked like, for instance, mice, or dolphins, you would not go there. That is, "what" a real dolphin looks like is obviously part of the identification process, so my, or anyone's, looking at real pangolins, armadillos, sheep, or whatever, is completely valid. And no "slider" necessary... it is a point by point comparsion.

Then, exactly as you did for your crayfish, we look at other illustrations of them, so see if we can date them or locate their origins. All normal, all done by everyone.

Where your "sliders" come into play, and become a problem, would be in accepting or rejecting any animal with changing settings, and I insist I do not do that, and others need to. In fact, you have actually co-opted a major argument of mine, which I use often, as you should remember: To argue the Voynich as genuine 1420, one must apply widely varying, inconsistent, and often hypocritical standards... the artist is good here, the artist is bad here; this looks old and is good, this looks new, so it is added; this expert agrees with me, so they are acceptable, those experts don't agree with 1420, they are bad experts; this construction/material/style is normal, proving 1420; this construction/material/style is not normal for 1420, meaning we just have not found another example, but it exists; this item looks exactly like this 1420 thing, so it is from 1420, but that item looks more like a 16th/17th/18th/19th century thing, so NOW the artist is a bad one. And so on...

On the contrary, Modern Forgery has to make NO alterations to standards in order to work: All the art work is of the same level of talent; all the observations as to content, materials, methods of construction, ages, all fit perfectly, and do not need any rationalization... no adjustment of "sliders", or standards. All the expert opinions fit, because they are (virtually) all correct: Everything they see is in there.