Minotaur and Medusa: The Commonest of Proper Nouns?

The monsters of D&D have, for the most part, been drawn primarily from folklore and mythology.  Of course, today, with the emphasis on branding, there is a trend away from traditional mythical creatures in favour of creating brandable intellectual properties, but in the old days, at least, the monsters of D&D were the enduring creatures we were familiar with from the stories of our childhood.

When I first started playing D&D, I was not well-read in the fantasy genre.  The only fantasy novels I'd read were The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, so my understanding of the game was heavily influenced by mythology, and Ray Harryhausen movies.  Consequently one of the very first monster miniatures I ever bought was this Citadel Minotaur, from their Fiend Factory line, which I bought in the winter of 1981.

I've recently been spending a lot of time organizing my old miniatures and when I found this one in the basement, I was immediately struck by how the imagery of the Minotaur has changed over the years.  This miniature is a classical depiction of the Minotaur; a man with the head of a bull.  In scale, it is no bigger than any other 25 mm man-sized miniature.  This is the Minotaur of myth, garbed in Greek robes and probably lurking in his labyrinth, waiting for Theseus to come run him through.

Compare this miniature to more modern depictions, such as this Reaper Minotaur:

Here we see a more bestial monster; a humanoid bull rather than a man with a bull's head, and he's gotten a whole lot larger (see the severed human head on the base for scale).

Here, now, is the Citadel's contemporary depiction of the Minotaur, which has changed considerably from their 1981 version:

This is even more bestial, and larger still, than the Reaper model above (again, note the human head on the base for scale).

And, finally, Citadel's 'boss' minotaur, the Doombull (there is a human skull in the right foreground of the base for scale):

Lining them up together really brings into focus how much the concept of the Minotaur has changed over the years:

There has been widespread escalation of scale in gaming iconography, as I've discussed previously, with respect to dwarves, and the upscaling of minotaurs is just part in parcel of the contemporary focus on the big and the bad-ass.

But I can't help wondering if the concept of the Minotaur has been diluted and bastardized because of their use in D&D as a common noun rather than a proper noun.  As far back as the original Monsters and Treasure book D&D has referred to minotaurs as a race rather than as the Minotaur, the 'Bull of Minos,' of mythology.  The reason for doing so is clear.  We want to use these great monsters of mythology in our campaigns, but we'll soon run out of things to fight if we make them all unique individuals.  And so Minotaur becomes minotaurs, even though the name doesn't make sense any more.  Perhaps it would have been better to call the race of bull-headed men homotaurs ('man-bulls') and consider the Minotaur to be a specific individual of that race, but of course everyone knows what a minotaur is while a homotaur would be just plain confusing.

The problem is that D&D has become self-referential and new generations of writers and artists look to D&D, rather than the original source mythology for their inspiration, and so we get a gradual but steady change of concept into something that bears little semblance to its forebear (kind of like 4E is to D&D).

The case in point would be this minotaur illustration from the 3E Monster Manual:

This illustration has gone to such ridiculous extremes of 'kewl' that it contains no bovine features.  Had I been shown this illustration without the context of the entry in the Monster Manual, I would never have known that that is what it is supposed to depict.  If forced to guess, I probably would have said it was supposed to be a Yeti, or something.

While I understand Gary's decision to turn proper nouns such as Minotaur and Lamia, the child-eating demon queen of Libya, into common nouns,  I'm less sympathetic towards medusae.  As most of us know, Medusa, along with her sisters, Euryale and Stheno, was a gorgon.  The gorgons were terrifying female creatures with snakes for hair, and the name derives from the Greek, gorgos, meaning grim or terrible.  Unlike the Minotaur, there was no need to turn Medusa into a common noun since we had the term gorgon to refer to the group.

Yet, in D&D, as far back as the original Monsters and Treasure, we have entries for both medusae (snake-haired women whose gaze will turn you to stone), and gorgons (scaly metal bulls who exhale poison gas that will turn you to stone).  Why the separation into two different types of monsters?  If Medusa the gorgon can be separated into medusae and gorgons, imagine what we could do with Sauron the Dark Lord.  "You open the door and are set upon by half a dozen saurons and your only escape is to fight your way through the pack of dark lords you left behind you in the last room."

I'm genuinely curious as to what was behind the creation of the bull-like gorgon monster of D&D.  If anyone knows or has a suspicion, please leave a comment.