[Renaud]

That out of the 300+ plants described about 12% could match some existing ones doesn't really allow anyone to make definitive conclusion as to whether these plants could be real. I'm sure you could match some of the simple ones to more than one plant and that still 85%+ that are unaccounted for.

Beside, that doesn't detract from the fact that the author of the manuscript could still have found inspiration into existing plants, imagination doesn't preclude a basis in reality.

Maybe the manuscript was written in Mexico. Maybe it is written in a cypher to obfuscate the fact that some of its content might be believed to be heretical (it contains a fair amount of naked women and appears to have some diagrams and illustrations that may relate to a theory of the origins of life or an animistic explanation of natural phenomena).

In an case, it's certainly an interesting subject of research, but I still think that the possibility of it being a work of pure fiction, maybe for the sole amusement of an eccentric rich patron, is a possibility.

[DanBC]

I've seen pictures of animals that were described to an illustrator. They're pretty far from the actual animal. Is that possible here?

I imagine drawing a plant from a dry mangled sample is going to be tricky.

[wavefunction]

Certainly. I agree with many of your excellent points. One other possibility is that this Manuscript copied from those earlier texts while 'adding' additional 'wholly new' creations. Or even that our knowledge of the bio-diversity of Central and South America is still lacking...

When this was still a curio with no apparent ties to any part of the world, I figured it was simply another 'esoteric knowledge system' using symbols and the structures of the information to convey that information without giving it away to the uninitiated. I wondered about the placement of leaves and vascular systems, colors used in combinations, the combinations of animals and plants and placements on the page. All the sorts of things esoteric scholars used to encipher their information in other works.

I think this final bit is what captivates the modern mind: we yearn to understand, even if the subject might turn out to be "meaningless" beyond a work of fantasy.