kedreeva:

hollyblueagate:

favorite medieval bestiary things

  • wolves and snakes will kill you if you have clothes but you’re fine if you’re ass naked because they’re scared of nude people
  • ostriches eat metal and have hooves
  • peacocks don’t fly often because they have ugly feet and don’t want people to see them. they scream when they wake up because of their repeated nightmares about being ugly.
  • “Stags live a long time; the ones that Alexander the Great had put gold necklaces on were caught a hundred years later

  • whale mouths smell so good fish just swim right in there
  • mice get pregnant from eating salt and their stomachs contain gold
  • snakes are very often drawn with wings and feet and are indistinguishable from depictions of dragons
  • pelicans kill their babies and then bring them back to life by cutting open their own chest and letting the babies drink the blood. every depiction of a pelican looks nothing like a pelican and shows them doing this. I have no clue what the bloodletting bird is meant to be or where they got this from.
  • hyenas aren’t known for their laugh but their ability to change genders
  • Spiders are worms of the air”

  • this drawing of a rabbit 

I can’t explain most of this, but I can explain that peafowl don’t fly because they’re bad at landing (like, really bad) on their feet, and that hyenas are still known for their sexual attributes, with females having a clitoris big enough it looks like a penis as a result of clitoromegaly. 

“The pseudopenises of female spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta), […] can be up to 90% as large as male penises and, at least from the outside, look almost exactly like actual penises, scrotum and all.” (x

So there’s that.