So why have you not seen your contributions online? Well… I am just one old man with database that needs to be updated, and that takes time. I have an enormous backlog of stuff waiting to be entered into the database, hundreds of manuscripts and beasts and bibliography and encyclopedia stuff and more and more and more… While I can’t possibly keep up with it all, I will get to it eventually, and in the meantime I have it all stashed in Zotero, a “personal research assistant”, as they call it – I call it some very useful software! Nothing is being lost, so in the fullness of time it will appear on the site.

So if you have new or updated information, corrections for my many mistakes, suggestions for encyclopedia articles, or anything else of interest, please send them along! And then please be patient…

This update is mostly about images, with an addition of about 400 from various sources. I have decided to use whatever images I can get my hands on; previously I was only using public domain images or images I had permission to use. I have now decided that art produced hundreds of years ago does not properly belong to anyone (or belongs to everyone), that copyright claims on such art or reproductions of it are bogus (a view upheld by the courts), and I have the right (nay, even a duty) to make the images available to all. This gives me a much larger stock of images to work with, and I am ever so slowly (a lot of work, remember?) adding more of them to my database.

A note on image quality: I grab medieval animal images from a lot of sources, and in many cases I have no control over the quality of the image. The digital facsimiles of manuscripts that libraries and museums publish  on the web are often of surprisingly low quality, and while I can (and do) use Photoshop tricks to improve the images somewhat, there is a limit to what can be done. This means you will see a wide variation in image quality here; I include these less than ideal images in the hope that they will be of some use. By the way, my use of Photoshop is only to enhance the appearance of images; I do not alter the image content on the main site, though I do sometimes take liberties on the Chimaera blog.

This update also fixes a bunch of broken links. People will move web pages around, leaving my links dangling. Unfortunately, a few of the pages I linked to have vanished entirely, so I have had to remove the links.

There are also updates to most sections of the site, but nothing major. I have plans for site revisions, but they will also be a lot of work, so don’t stay up waiting for them to appear.

Statistics! Everybody likes numbers, right? Right? Well, never mind, I like them, so here’s a bunch:

Number of visits to bestiary.ca in 2008: 454,238   
Number of page views in 2008: 1,478,193
Number of beasts: 141
Number of manuscripts: 257
Number of bibliography entries: 1521
Number of beast images: 1303

Do try the “wall of beasts” on the Beasts page; it goes on forever now.

Imagine you are standing in front of a wall. If you look to your left or right, you can see that the wall stretches out far into the hazy distance. On the wall are arranged a series of pictures, all of bestiary beasts. If you move closer, you can see more detail, and a note appears below the picture to explain what you are seeing. You can walk along the wall in either direction, and as you do, more pictures come into view. You can stroll along looking at the beasts, stopping to examine one here and there.

Sound like fun? Well, now you can do it! Virtually, anyway. The Medieval Bestiary is now Cooliris enabled, giving you the wall of beasts.

Cooliris? What’s Cooliris, you ask plaintively. Cooliris is a browser extension that lets you browse a set of images displayed on the virtual wall of beasts described above. The extension is free, easy to install, and safe. It is available for Windows and Mac (sorry, penguinites, no Linux version yet), and for the more common browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari). Of course the highly intelligent readers of this blog only use Firefox, but if you are forced by unfortunate circumstances to use the inferior Internet Explorer, it will still work.

Anyway, the Firefox logo shows a fox with its tail on fire, which is something that could readily happen to Reynard, and thus Firefox is the right browser for this site. QED.

Back to Cooliris. You can download and install it from the Cooliris site; instructions are here. Once you have it installed (mere seconds for blissful Firefox users, longer for sad Internet Explorer users), you can go to the Beasts index page (the only page Cooliris enabled so far), then click the Cooliris icon in your browser’s toolbar or click the Cooliris icon near the bottom of the page. The wall of beasts will appear;  the pictures are in alphabetical order by beast name, from Amphisbaena to Yale. You can “walk” along the wall by dragging the slider at the bottom of the page. When you see a beast you would like more information about, click the picture to zoom in and see the notes; you can also click the “Jump to page” icon near the bottom of the screen to zip to the main page for that beast.

More pages will be Cooliris enabled in the future. Problems? Tell the Beastmaster!