One of my favorite things when I was a teenager was the loose leaf pages of the AD&D 2E monster manuals. I loved how the best entries treated the monsters they covered with the seriousness of an 18th century naturalist, positing theories on how a goblin exists inside its corner of a wider ecosystem. And as these entries evolved through the 90s, they started to include entries for singular monsters. Tim the Werewolf rather than werewolves.