Unseen beasts drift faster

Claim (verbatim)

Unseen beasts drift faster. Bestiary images descend copy by copy, but the copyist's eye corrects toward nature only where nature is available: a fox or hedgehog is re-anchored by daily perception, while a crocodile, whale, or bonnacon is pure graphic descent with no external referent. Iconographic drift rate should therefore split by the animal's local observability, not by its textual prominence or page rank — perception acts as an error-correcting code that exotic creatures never receive.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it): across the digitized English bestiary corpus (Families I and II, a dozen or more complete witnesses), landmark-based shape distance between matched images of the same creature in related witnesses is at least twice as large, on average, for exotic and fabulous creatures as for locally observable ones, controlling for image size and frame. Secondary clause: categorical copying errors — mirror reversals, changed limb counts, lost diagnostic attributes — occur in exotic creatures at at least three times the local-animal rate.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Aberdeen Bestiary's complete open digitization, Bodleian MSS Ashmole 1511 and Bodley 764 on Digital Bodleian, and the British Library's digitized bestiaries in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

That bestiary artists re-anchored locally observable animals to perception while copying exotic and fabulous creatures blind -- the crocodile drawn as a deer-gryphon, the whale from hearsay -- is standard doctrine (Wikipedia, 'Representation of animals in Western medieval art'; the wider medieval-bestiary literature), which the item's own guard concedes. Not located: the item's sharpening from static inaccuracy to a differential DRIFT RATE across a stemma -- landmark-shape distance between matched images of a creature in related witnesses averaging >= 2x larger for exotic/fabulous than for locally observable creatures, with categorical errors (mirror reversals, changed limb counts, lost attributes) >= 3x more frequent -- measured over the digitized English bestiary corpus. Perception-as-error-correction documented; the observability-graded drift-rate measurement is unrun.

• Wikipedia, 'Representation of animals in Western medieval art' — Exotic animals drawn from written descriptions or earlier drawings without observation; familiar animals corrected toward nature.
• The Aberdeen Bestiary complete digitization; Digital Bodleian (MSS Ashmole 1511, Bodley 764) — The kill dataset for the landmark-based drift-rate comparison across related witnesses.

Predictions

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