The direction of the scales does not rule it out as being a Pangolin. It is however a relevant point that it could be a sheep (a ram). That is a rebuttal of value. Your process of elimination on the other hand is logically invalid. None of the pictures in the book have full scientific accuracy. It's not like Da Vinci's botanical works and drawings where the precision is superb and pure such that there can be no mistake as to what you're looking at. This is what it would take to be able to rule out identification based on such a singular detail. You can consider it as though not design in a manner so as to avoid mistaken interpretation.
However, it could well signify a cloud inspired form. If you consider how a child draws a cloud then exaggerate the curve. I think it's more likely the Aries Ram. It is a rather crude drawing with a weird stance (a bit like from bull fighting). It might be ambiguous in that sometimes the animal hangs its head when exhausted or wounded but also when charging to sweep up. It is not impossible that it oddly combines both the Aries Ram and Agnus Dei itself. In these pages there is a woman holding what appears to be a golden Christian cross and it would potentially be consistent with that.
It could be a spurious indication of a foreign influence but then there are others. I do not believe it's conclusive what the drops could indicate. They are just vague lines. These are also commonly used to denote precipitation or floating. Again, children even do it subconsciously sometimes in drawings which seems oddly scientific as it indicates thrust. The ink for these seems to be a red but the problem there is that the standard ink is also dark red. You could also interpret it as two women very smelly feet at the top and a cloud of flatulence escaping the woman handing over the bagel.
You still have Onion domes. The book is likely to be authored around the time these potentially just start to appear in Europe. The earlier remaining examples are a bit later in the possible timeline for authorship. I would suggest that it could be around on the cusp of whatever this particular wave is of an influence from the Near East spreading across Europe. I might suggest some influence potentially being the result of pilgrimage. In Europe the Onion Domes have a cross on top of them but this doesn't really look right and I suspect is tacked on later roughly the same as with moons where as the natural continuous geometric shape is normally more like a point of a weapon.
I did not make it clear but I have not yet dated all of the foreign influences on the book to form a timeline. However, it does make sense the Pangolin is spurious as the impression I get is that the link all the way to the Philippines and possibly South East Asia is thousands of years old and what this tells us is that it is very likely to be derived from a real language and in a sense in the same linguistic genetic pool (sharing common ancestors) or race of languages (it seems human, not alien so far) as those surviving today with caution as these findings are very preliminary, at this point only 5% of the work is done and early tests have been run to test it while being constructed. The link to the near east likely is more recent.
While I'm still working on this project there are some funny things I can show you. Even for a panel for some basic features on the side the form is massive. In programming there are a number of techniques I have applied across the board for efficiency. This is one of the fields that I am a specialist in. I use all kinds of techniques like the scripts to save cycles, file sizes, key presses and to compact views. Ironically it may turn out that a solution arises not in the algorithms to study the text but the interface and infrastructure around that. For example:
Code:
Concad -> Concatenated
Concat -> Concatenate
Nbours -> Neighbours
Alnum -> Alphanumeric
Freqs -> Frequencies
Cards -> Cardinals
Nbour -> Neighbour
Covn -> Conversion
Char -> Character
Coed -> Converted
Excl -> Exclusive
Freq -> Frequency
Card -> Cardinal
Comd -> Combined
Lang -> Language
Pats -> Patterns
Rixs -> Matrixes
Comb -> Combine
Comp -> Compact
Lens -> Lengths
Mats -> Matches
Olap -> Overlap
Shuf -> Shuffle
Strs -> Strings
Comm -> Common
Cnts -> Counts
Rats -> Ratios
Shad -> Shared
Sord -> Sorted
Stat -> Static
Tots -> Totals
Uniq -> Unique
Lin -> Transliteration
Lid -> Transliterated
Lit -> Transliterate
Ico -> Inconsistent
Con -> Consistent
Arb -> Arbitrary
Occ -> Occurence
Mul -> Multiply
Rel -> Relative
Tpl -> Template
Nat -> Natural
Pat -> Pattern
Eng -> English
Rev -> Reverse
Baz -> Base62
Bef -> Before
Div -> Divide
Len -> Length
Let -> Letter
Lir -> Linear
Rix -> Matrix
Num -> Number
Par -> Parent
Str -> String
Aft -> After
Chi -> Child
Cnt -> Count
Emp -> Empty
Gue -> Guess
Mat -> Match
Ord -> Order
Rat -> Ratio
Tot -> Total
Bth -> Both
Bz -> Base36
# Number of, count or numerical index/id
() Special characters representing the beginning and end of a word.
[] Special characters representing the beginning and end of a line.
{} Special characters representing the beginning and end of a paragraph.
^$ Special characters representing the beginning and end of a word via any mechanism.
This is used to compress the text in the interface when the form is small or is supposed to. It's only a tiny excerpt but just doing this sometimes you do see things that have a prospect to be indicative of what it looks like might be going on with the VM but as I have to keep saying I can only get back to people on that after I have actually followed all leads using the methodology I am applying which is more long term than short term. It's not a minor project. Very approximately I have done around 100 hours out of around 1000 scheduled and that is in spite of being quite fluent at the work. Though it should be considered the fascinating connection between a modern equivalent to a scribe working with machines and their codes with an ancient scribe writing books.
Notice this has the phone number effect. This is one thing in the pipeline, to work out with the words as presented how resistant it is compare to other languages to mutations. That is, it's like testing how well a hash function works for collisions. If it collides easily with few character mutations then something has sucked out the redundancy normally in language and there's already indication of this. You see in my list how long words where you can safely mistype a character then correct now have only one character differences. Comb, comp and conv are now all vulnerable to an undetected or uncorrectable error. I recommend you try this yourself and especially pay attention to the mistakes you made. I did Lin twice and had to change Linear / Lin to Lir. Also pay attention to the different rules that emerge in different cases with prefix as basic but then it becomes more complex for each special case.
I avoid collisions with the full language as I am not using it but this can be a problem later if I cannot foresee the full working set. Instead I do it against the restricted subset I have present in the current interface. There are ways around this. A scribe is not using a word processor. I can systematically go back and change anything as I am using magic. For the scribe the later words that collide have to move instead of the prior words which are the immovable object. It is also possible to detect and partially reconstruct a restricted set if you know the topic and it appears elsewhere but again, this is for later. This is kind of basic but I overlook nothing if possible in my holistic approach.