Back from vacation, time to recover!
Serpopard:
The serpopard is a mythical animal known from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art. The word “serpopard” is a modern coinage. It is a portmanteau of “serpent” and “leopard“, derived from the interpretation that the creature represents an animal with the body of a leopard and the long neck and head of a serpent. However, they have also been interpreted as “serpent-necked lions”. There is no known name for the creature in any ancient texts. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “Serpopards or Sauropods? ‘Dead Varmint Vision’ Makes Cats Look Like Dinosaurs,” Philip J. Senter, Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 2024, paywall):
Archaeologists use the term serpopard to denote a cat with an exaggerated neck, a motif that appears occasionally on ancient Sumerian and Egyptian artifacts. The term combines the words serpent and leopard. The former is a reference to the snake-like neck, and the latter acknowledges that apart from the neck, the animal is one of the big cats. It doesn’t have a mane, so it is not a male lion, but it could be meant as a lioness. The significance of the elongated necks in these feline images is currently a mystery.
Unfortunately, the balance of the article is a clumsy putdown of creationists. Rather than emphasizing that removing the elongated necks makes them cats, a virtually irrelevant point, Senter should have disproven the sauropod contention by noting the lack of dinosaur/sauropod features, then built up the cat contention by citing the various resemblances.
Still, an organic reference would have been better, but apparently nothing of the sort is available, which is not on Senter.
