And here's a site worthy of the sidebar, the Aberdeen Bestiary Project. It loads a bit slowly for me, but it has excellent quality images of the original bestiary, with a translation of the latin adjacent; and further down each page are the Latin and translation side by side. And we learn things such as this:

There is an animal called the hyena, which inhabits the tombs of the dead and feeds on their bodies. Its nature is that it is sometimes male, sometimes female, and it is therefore an unclean animal. Since its spine is rigid, all in one piece, it cannot turn round except by turning its body right around.

And this piece of lore should come as no surprise to Buffy fans:

[I]t stalks the sheepfolds of shepherds and circles their houses by night, and by listening carefully learns their speech, so that it can imitate the human voice, in order to fall on any man whom it has lured out at night.