Bestiarium Ignotum

(Lat., "Unknown Bestiary") The suppressed natural-history book of the famous 18th-century Swedish botanist and taxonomist, Carolus or Carl Linnaeus.

No one is sure whether some wizard of the botanist's acquaintance tipped him off to the existence of the Atlantean rafting project, or whether he himself deduced that there were some lifeforms in Europe which seemed to have few similarities (or tremendous differences) from the native species. But during Linnaeus's stay in Amsterdam in the early 1730's, when he was working on classification of new species with Professor Johan Burman in the city's botanical garden, he apparently began the first jottings on some odd creatures he had seen during his travels outside Sweden some years before, during the period he had been acquiring his MD. As so often happens, the jottings grew and grew as other scientists got wind of what Linnaeus was doing, and started sending him odd specimens to classify.

This period came to an abrupt end in 1737, shortly after the publication of Linnaeus's Critica Botanica, when a specimen basilisk got out of its cage in the botanical garden of the Dutch East India Company's Georg Clifford and wrought the predictable havoc in the neighborhood.