peryton

noun

1. A fictional creature having the head and forelegs of a stag and the wings and hindquarters of a bird.

   “Then, quite unexpectedly, when I had been staring at them for a long time, the shape of a peryton seemed to spring out as distinctly as if the bird's whole body had been powdered with the dust ground from diamonds.”

   “The peryton also makes an appearance, in a nod to its inventor, Borges — who compiled his own bestiary, “The Book of Imaginary Beings,” itself supposedly based on a long-lost medieval text.”

2. A radio signal which appears to come from outside the galaxy but is actually produced by terrestrial sources.

   “Three of these FRBs are factors of >3 narrower than any documented peryton.”

   “In this model, the Lorimer burst, which was detected in three adjacent beams of the multibeam receiver, occupies a place between traditional FRB events and traditional peryton events and is believed to have occurred at some distance from the detector close to the Fresnel scale for Parkes, 20 km.”