THE MYSTERIOUS MANTICORE

Manticore

Ctesias (5th Century BC) was an Ancient Greek.  I don't mean he himself was ancient, but he came from Greece in ancient times.  However, he traveled eastwards to Persia (Iran) and wrote about India and other topics.

He describes a creature he calls the martihora, but this word was later corrupted to manticore,its common name today.    He said it had the face of a man, the body of a lion and a sting on the end of its tail.  It could shoot out spines and these spines were deadly, unless you happened to be an elephant.  Commentators generally think Ctesias was describing a tiger, because there was a belief that this beast could shoot its whiskers at adversaries.  However, I assume he was working only from descriptions and not very good ones if that was the case.