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Description
The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, romanized: tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates speaks of his own image-making as similar to that of painters who paint goat-stags, combining the features of different things together.
In his work De Interpretatione, Aristotle utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is describable even though it does not really exist. He returns to this in the Posterior Analytics. to argue that, though the word is definable, there can be no definition of the species as it has no members. He also uses the tragelaphos together with the Sphinx in the Physics[5] to illustrate the point that a non-existent creature has no spatial location.
On the other hand, Diodorus Siculus treats the tragelaphos as an existing animal, and there are references in Greek literature to other hybrid creatures such as the hippelaphos (horse-stag).
The word hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398 (now at the Bodleian Library)

Description
The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, romanized: tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates speaks of his own image-making as similar to that of painters who paint goat-stags, combining the features of different things together.
In his work De Interpretatione, Aristotle utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is describable even though it does not really exist. He returns to this in the Posterior Analytics. to argue that, though the word is definable, there can be no definition of the species as it has no members. He also uses the tragelaphos together with the Sphinx in the Physics[5] to illustrate the point that a non-existent creature has no spatial location.
On the other hand, Diodorus Siculus treats the tragelaphos as an existing animal, and there are references in Greek literature to other hybrid creatures such as the hippelaphos (horse-stag).
The word hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398 (now at the Bodleian Library)