Case file · Cryptid
Herberstein reports the 'vegetable lamb'
The imperial envoy Sigismund von Herberstein, in his 'Notes on Muscovite Affairs' (1549), repeated a story he had heard of the 'baranets', a plant growing between the Volga and the Yaik that bore a living lamb on its stalk and grazed the grass around it.
1549 CE · 52.80, 50.20 · status: legend
The account
Herberstein said he had first thought it a fable but was told it by trustworthy people. The 'Vegetable Lamb of Tartary' became a favourite European marvel; in the 18th century naturalists identified 'specimens' as the woolly rhizome of the tree fern Cibotium barometz, shaped by hand into little lambs. The location is the broad steppe east of Samara.
The sceptical view
Probably a garbled report of cotton, combined with fern-root curios.