Leucrota

Ancient bestiaries describe a beast that was supposedly a fast, dangerous hybrid of lioness and hyena—but with a set of features that are… a bit all over the place.

It’s said to have had the legs of a stag and the chest and neck of a lion. Oh, and it was the size of a donkey. Well, technically, an ass, but same thing.

And then you get to the head.

Ancient naturalists like good old Pliny the Elder claimed it looked like a badger’s—except the mouth stretched all the way back to its ears, and instead of teeth it had a single continuous ridge of bone.

Which immediately raises the question: what on earth was it eating?

Because animals with that kind of setup today tend to be herbivores, or else they’re crushing shells or hoovering up soft things like molluscs and jellyfish. It’s not exactly a “tear chunks out of people” sort of arrangement.

And yet… according to legend, that’s exactly what it did.

I mean, sure, the Ancient World believed it would mimic human voices to lure people in—which is creepy enough on its own—but it does leave a bit of a gap in the story. Once it’s got you there… then what?

Maybe it worked like thylacoleo, the ancient ‘drop-cat’ marsupial from the Pleistocene era in Australia. They had weird dentition, too, but they were definitely carnivorous. Best theory is that they lurked in trees, then leapt upon their victim and used their weird teeth to shear through the neck of their prey.

Though Pliny reckons the leucrota was “the swiftest of all beasts” (VIII. 72-72), so it was probably more of a chaser than an ambush predator.

I digress.

According to the ancients, the leucrota specifically mimicked ‘the voices of men’, so maybe it didn’t care for the taste of women and children?

Modern scholars tend to lump the leucrota in with the crocuta, and maybe that’s fair. Taxonomy wasn’t exactly a priority at the time—close enough was usually good enough.

If they are the same creature, though, it gets interesting. The crocuta—allegedly the offspring of a wolf and a dog—is now generally thought to be an early description of the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocota).

Which would at least explain the voice mimicry. Hyenas already sound unsettlingly human when they “laugh.”

The leucrota makes an appearance in my second book, Blood on the Ferns—though I should warn you, it doesn’t have a particularly good time of it.

Still, if that puts you off, the manticore’s in there too… and it’s having a much better day.