Also, the whole notion of drawing things “accurately” is a rather modern one. Symbolism has trumped naturalism for most of art history (including now, for most purposes). Artists often never even thought about looking at the actual animal before depicting it because what it actually looked like wasn’t particularly relevant.
To me it looked like a dog chasing a car who finally catches up to it.
“Well, we caught it!”
“… uh, great - now what do we do with it? 
”
It’s Medieval times. You survive as an artist or artisan or monkish copyist. You do 1) whatever your patron or master or bishop wants and 2) whatever imaginative crap you can sneak into the work. Does the bishop want elephants carved in the cathedral? Done. Does the father superior inspect your copied manuscript for pr0n drawn in the margins? Would he even care?
Consider the smutty carvings and marginalia as cartoon figures, immortalized grafitti. They’re just part of the human condition.
Wait til you see their paintings of God.
Where was the artist that they’d never seen an oyster?
14th century Flanders. They had definitely seen an oyster before, which illustrates the points made above that naturalism wasn’t the goal.
A horrible alternative: the artistry is accurate. Entities looking like those DID exist. This ties in with Heinlein’s Multiverse, where everything imagined, happens. Every possible monster and monstrosity is around somewhere. Be careful where you sit down.
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