Many moons ago I received a highly unusual request from an old researcher friend of mine who’d been doing some bleeding-edge work on the furthest reaches of modern science. He asked me to create a scientific illustration based on his eyewitness account of a creature heretofore unknown to academic zoology. I took up this unusual request with gusto, and spent day and night trying to make some sense of its bizarre purported physiognomy. Could such a strange creature exist somewhere out there on God’s green earth? Or was it merely a trick of the light that had duped a weary field researcher to mistake a commonplace weather balloon/sunken log/hairless dog for something greater? It is the measured opinion (and yearning hope) of this scientific illustrator that somehow, somewhere, the topiary crab-horse really is out there. I want to believe.