Myth of the Week 012

Of the mythical Crocotta, a deadly dog-wolf hybrid, Pliny wrote: 

“...among the shepherds’s homesteads it simulates human speech, and picks up the name of one of them so as to call him to come out of doors and tear him to pieces, and also that it imitates a person being sick, to attract the dogs so that it may attack them; that this animal alone digs up corpses; that a female is seldom caught; that its eyes have a thousand variations of color; moreover that when its shadow falls on dogs they are struck dumb; and that it has certain magic arts by which it causes every animal at which it gazes three times to stand rooted to the spot. When crossed with this race of animals the Ethiopian lioness gives birth to the corocotta, that mimics the voices of men and cattle in a similar way. It has a unbroken ridge of bone in each jaw, forming a continuous tooth without any gum.”

— Pliny, in his Natural History, c. AD 77-79

The Crocotta, as depicted in the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary, an illuminated manuscript bestiary.