Weirdest Medieval Bestiary Beast

Medieval encyclopedias described animals that nobody in the room had ever seen, and the artists drew them anyway, working from the written description alone.

The results are a record of what happens when text is the only available source. An elephant becomes a horse with a trumpet attached to the front. A whale becomes an island that sailors moor to and light a fire on, which was reported as established fact rather than legend. Some entries were never animals at all — the bonnacon defends itself with burning excrement, geese grow on trees, and the salamander lives comfortably inside a fire. Others are moral instruction wearing fur, because the point of a bestiary was theology rather than zoology, and accuracy was never among the goals. Thirty-three beasts are in, taken from manuscript illuminations held in public collections across Europe.

What makes these genuinely hard to rank is that some are honest errors and some are deliberate allegory. The fox preaching to a congregation of geese was never meant to be believed. The elephant absolutely was, and the gap between those two is roughly where the humour lives.