Spotty camels and naming things we've never seen before

A medieval giraffe in distress, from an early 13th century bestiary manuscript, Oxford, Merton College, MS. 249

What does the mind do when it encounters something it has never seen before, not something slightly unfamiliar, not a variation on a known theme, but something genuinely, categorically new?

The brain, it turns out, does not like starting from s…