gryphon

He hacked a gryphon out of the air.

They argue over who will get to ride the gryphon but Widget relents when Celia tells them the story of the nine-tailed fox just behind it, which suddenly sounds much more appealing.

She stood outside the mullioned window, stroked the gryphon’s sleek feathered head, and suffered a pang of absurd envy.

“Yeah, him too. But they were talking about Herodotus saying there were giant ants and gryphons guarding gold mines, and how he made this stuff up.”

One newspaperman described the megalosaurus, the greatest of the “antediluvian monsters,” as a scaly dragon with the “head of a gryphon” and an “eye as big as a cheese-cake.”