Lion
http://www.historyextra.com/article/feature/beasts-wonder-reading-animals-middle-ages
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast78.htm
The lion is considered the king of beasts, and is usually the first animal described in a bestiary. Some of the characteristics the lion is given is that it always sleeps with it’s eyes open (a symbol of how Christ slept corporally on the cross but kept his divinity awake, just as the lion sleeps but never lets his guard down entirely). They give birth to dead cubs but after three days the father roars and they come back to life, like the resurrection of christ.
In more modern tellings these ideas have persisted, Aslan in ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ sacrifices himself only to be resurrected again. A lion is also referred to as ‘the king of the jungle’.
Unicorn
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast140.htm
It is often described as a small goat, ass or horse with a single horn on it’s head. In the ‘Pliny the Elder’ (1st Century) description it says ‘It has the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead’. It is the enemy of the elephant, and kills it by wounding it’s belly. The only way it can be captured is of you trap it with a virgin girl. It represents Christ, it’s horn a symbol of the unity between christ and god. It is very difficult to capture which represents Christ’s ability to stay away from hell and evil.
It is sometimes called a ‘monocerus’, and is believed to be based on the Rhinoceros.
Manticore
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast177.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manticore
http://mistholme.com/dictionary/man-tyger/
‘The manticore is a composite beast from India, with a blood-colored lion’s body, the face of a man with blue eyes, and a tail resembling the sting of a scorpion. It can leap great distances and is very active. It eats human flesh. Its voice is a whistle that sounds like a melody from pipes. Some say it can shoot spines from its tail.’
One of the stranger bestiary creatures, it has the face of man and the body of a lion, some stories saying it has three rows of teeth and lives off human flesh. It is of Persian origin, and probably came from a description of a tiger that has got a bit out of hand.
It is sometimes referred to as a Mantyger, but sometimes these are two different things. ‘The man-tyger is a monster, consisting of a lion with a human head; sometimes the feet have been replaced by human hands. It’s been suggested [Dennys 116] that the monster is an heraldic representation of the baboon of nature: the cant with Babyngton, who used the man-tyger as a badge in 1529, supports this theory. The man-tyger is very similar to the manticore, and may be considered an artistic variant.’ It also has links to the sphinx in it’s nature.
Maddy Caulfield Animation 