alrighty what's a myrmecoleon?
Alright buckle up motherfuckers because I never had a chance to present my temporary hyperfixation to the class of 100 students the way I was promised so I'm going to make it everybody's problem.
MYRMECOLEON!
Also known as the ant-lion, this magnificent beast would be nature's way of saying "Fuck this, I give up" - had it existed.
Because it's literally a half-ant-half-lion hybrid.
Pictured like this in Hortus Sanitatis (which has quickly become my favourite bestiary, we'll get to that)
the ant-lion is of course a mythical being. Which would be a reasonable end to the tale of this wonderous and possibly cursed creature, sure.
EXCEPT!
Just like many (or at least enough to be funny) creatures, this wonderful beast was quite possibly created due to a linguistic slip-up, a ye olde typo, if you will, a glitch in translation due to a mistake in the translated script, from possibly the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
So why is it in Hortus Sanitatis? Because one of the things this specific bestiary and herbiary is know for is that it includes mythical and folklore creatures and animals, which is made even more fun when you consider the author didn't really bother much trying to separate them from one another (As far as I know, I'm making my way through it with a damn dictionary so my progress is slow and a little confusing.) (It also has like a whole thing about uroscopy, which could mean nothing.)
If you want to check out the surrounding text, I took the illustration from page 550/913 of Hortus Sanitatis as scanned here.
Bestiaries in general have this fun tendency to use translated texts from other sources which can often be blamed for such fun things like accidentally inventing a whole new animal through a typo or accidentally filing a giraffe under chameleon (I'm pretty sure somebody far more educated on this topic than me made a post about that specific instance already).
So basically, Myrmecoleon is a lil or big fella that probably wouldn't be able to actually survive if real and was possibly created due to a typo being mistranslated by accident, which manages to tick off almost every box to make it my favourite creature rn.
I just think it's neat :3
