Imaginary taxonomy

[redbird]

A conversation with cattitude about birds of different sorts, including the chicken he's planning to roast for dinner, birds flying overhead, and the birds in a dream he'd told me about, led me to the remark "Not all the birds of the mind are imaginary." Some are remembered.

That led us to a bit from Sondheim's Into the Woods: "Manticore? Imaginary. Griffin? Extinct." Thence, to the question of whether the griffin was, in fact, a bird. I asserted that it was a mammal, because it had fur. Cattitude noted that the question was whether it had breasts, and I observed that this might be difficult to discover in the absence of a good museum specimen, because soft tissue doesn't fossilize and illustrators might have drawn breasts that didn't exist, if they liked the idea, or omitted actual breasts if they thought them inappropriate (either as too sexual or as insufficiently aerodynamic). It then occurred to me that the classical griffin is half lion: the front half. The back half is the eagle. That suggests that griffins are part of the very small group of egg-laying mammals: a cloaca from the eagle side of the family, and breasts from the lion side.

Comments

[carandol.livejournal.com]

But... I always thought a grifin was an eagle at the *front* -- eagle's head and front legs, and wings, and a lion's hindquarters. Several books I've got back me up on this, as does Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin

In which case it would have teats like a cat, and give birth to live young.

And in that case, I feel really sorry for the female griffin, which would have to suckle young with eagle's beaks!

[redbird]

Ah, well. Another beautiful theory shot down by ugly fact.

Griffin formula, anyone?

[carandol.livejournal.com]

Feeling rather guilty at being depicted as Ugly Fact, the Great White Hunter, I've delved at little more and discovered, for what it's worth, that the Persian god Zu was a lion at the front and an eagle at the back. Sadly, he's definitely male, and not part of a species. But one could speculate about his ideal partner...

[redbird]

You, carandol, are neither ugly nor particularly factual.

[carandol.livejournal.com]

A curiously sphinx-like statement, half-compliment, half-insult :-)

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

Manticore? Robertson Davies. Griffin? Family Guy. Next?

"die gedanken sind frei" - associate freely.

Hmm... the front half of Robertson Davies and the back half of Peter Griffin.