Ctesias of Cnidus was a physician at the Persian court in the late fifth century before the common era, and he wrote an account of India based on what he was told there rather than on travel. In it is the martichora: the body of a lion, a human face, three rows of teeth, and a tail that fires spines. He says he saw one at court. Nothing in the account is independently confirmed and Ctesias had a reputation for credulity in antiquity itself.
The transmission is unusually clean. Aristotle repeats the description and names Ctesias as his source, which is an early example of a naturalist marking a claim as second hand. Pliny takes it up and gives it a Latin audience, Aelian passes it on, and from there it enters the medieval bestiaries, where it acquires colour and a moral. Every later manticore in European art descends from one man's report of a conversation.
The name is the most interesting survival. It is generally derived from Old Persian elements meaning man and eater, which suggests that what Ctesias heard was a description of the tiger, an animal Greek writers did not know well and Persian informants did. If that is right, the manticore is a real animal that lost its identity in transmission and grew a human face on the way, which is the opposite of the usual direction of travel for a monster.