"Its purely for research! I swear!" -Twilight Sparkle
In Equestria, there exists a book called The Ponys Compendium of Social Creatures that extensively outlines the many known sentient and sapient creatures, from dragons to zebras to griffons. It explains each species strengths, weaknesses, anatomy, diet and general social structures. It also touches upon some of the most prevalent cultures.
More than half of the book is censored by the Equestrian Monarchy as those parts explain, in very graphic detail, mating rituals, seduction techniques and how to "have relations" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), including illustrations. Uncensored versions are extremely rare and are highly sought after by certain collectors. For reasons.
Due to the explicit content and the fact most of the book was written mostly from first-hand accounts, most academic circles are either unaware of it, vehemently deny its existence or discredit the information found in it. For the most part, the book is accurate, especially the censored parts.
At some point in the future, this book is plagiarized by a thaumic biologist who removes all the parts that describe seduction and intercourse techniques and updates the sections about cultures. The much smaller book and less detailed book, The Complete Reference of Cognizants, went on to become a regularly assigned textbook for what we would consider to be college-level students and brought a large amount of notoriety to the author. It wasnt until after the plagiarists death that the truth was uncovered.
The original contributors of the The Ponys Compendium of Social Creatures are mostly unknown, given only as pseudonyms. A number of the known contributors were dead by the time of publishing due to the research that went into the book. Ill let you guess why.
Hint: Theres a section about dragons and some of the information about full grown dragons was censored.