User talk:OldBrentish
On Hippogriff, I thought I could clear it up a bit - the idea of mating a horse with a griffin DOES show up in works from the Antiquity, but only as the symbol of something that is impossible to do. The name of the potential resulting creature, "hippogriff", is never mention at all in those works, but it is possible that Ariosto may have used the idea to create the impossible creature present in his books.