Madame de Villeneuve's Beast

This is my first attempt to draw the Beast from Madame de Villeneuve's "The Story of Beauty and the Beast" which was the first, and so, the original French tale of Beauty and the Beast. Unfortunately, the world chose much more poor variant de Beaumont as a source for numerous movie, cartoon and book adaptations. And I must say that it is precisely Madame de Villeneuve's variant where you can find so much interesting points and explanations which de Beaumont preferred to exclude from her extremely short retelling. Among such things is the Beast's description. It is quite poor, but de Beaumont said nothing about it at all, except that the Beast was hideous.
So, Madame de Villeneuve tells us that the Beast has a large trunk, similar to one of an elephant, horrible paws, clanging scales and a quite massive body. I tried to include all these features in my design, however, I found no way to draw "clanging scales" without depriving the Beast of the look of a mammal. And I consider that this is a very important thing to make hum look more like a mammal than anything else. To achieve this goal I also added the fur. The thing is that, in my opinion, if I made the Beast mainly elephant-looking (as suggests the trunk), he could be ugly, but not enough scary. And the Beast being scary is an important thing, for Beauty really was afraid that he would eat her (Eh. Carnivore elephants?). So I tried to minimize influence of the elephant features on the final design. I did this also to make the Beast look more chimerical, for only such thing, unspecified, unnatural, and so, monstrous, can be really scary and abominable, which the main features of the Beast are.
In general, I do like what I made. However, maybe I will come up with another design with clanging scales and the Beast's general frame looking more animalistic. And for now, I hope you like it.

EDIT: You can read Madame de Villeneuve version of the tale here: www.deviantart.com/users/outgo…