Cockatrice

Described by Laurence Breiner as "an ornament in the drama and poetry of the Elizabethans", it was featured prominently in English thought and myth for centuries.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a derivation from Old French cocatris, from medieval Latin calcatrix, a translation of the Greek ichneumon, meaning tracker.

The twelfth century legend was based on a reference in Pliny's Natural History[1] that the ichneumon lay in wait for the crocodile to open its jaws for the trochilus bird to enter and pick its teeth clean.

[2] An extended description of the cocatriz by the 15th-century Spanish traveller in Egypt, Pedro Tafur, makes it clear that this refers to the Nile crocodile.

[3] According to Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum (ca 1180), the basilisk (basiliscus) was the product of an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad; a snake might be substituted in re-tellings.

[4] This legend has a possible Egyptian folk root; the eggs of the ibis were regularly destroyed for fear that the venom of the snakes they consumed would cause a hybrid snake-bird to hatch.

In E. R. Eddison's high fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4 has King Gorice show a cockatrice to Gro: "Behold and see, that which sprung from the egg of a cock, hatched by the deaf adder.

[22] The cockatrice is also a dungeon boss in the underground labyrinth gameplay section of Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time (2017), a video game for PC and PS4.

The third chapter of the Japanese manga series Delicious in Dungeon (2014) and the second episode of the anime adaptation (2024) feature the party killing and cooking a cockatrice.

[24] Arthur Fox-Davies describes the cockatrice as "comparatively rare" in heraldry, and as closely resembling a wyvern outside of possessing a rooster's head rather than a dragon's.