Another dip into the bestiaries.

A faience leopard and a hippopotamus from Ancient Eygypt. The Talpas not being millionaires, these are, of course, modern reproductions.


This is what Aberdeen University's Bestiary, written and illuminated in England around the year 1200 AD, has to say about the leopard.

Of the pard

The pard is a species which has a mottled skin, is extremely swift and thirsts for blood; for it kills at a single bound. 

The leopard is the product of the adultery of a lioness with a pard; their mating produces a third species. As Pliny says in his Natural History: the lion mates with the pard, or the pard with the lioness, and from both degenerate offspring are created, such as the mule and the burdon.

The Aberdeen bestiary doesn't mention the hippopotamus, but other bestiaries do. For example, Thomas of Cantimpré's, Liber de natura rerum, produced in France in around the year 1290. You can see the illustration here.