D&D Monsters: Bulettes

The bulette is a creature original to D&D. Like the owlbear, it's based on a plastic toy from Hong Kong, in its case probably meant to represent some sort of kaiju, although it's hard to know for sure. It's one of a minority of original monsters to have an actual name right from the start, rather than a descriptive term ('mind flayer', 'carrion crawler', 'trapper'). 

Incidentally, Gygax originally intended the word to be pronounced as "boo-lay", and official material from WoTC, and TSR before them, used to insist on this - and maybe still does. This raises a question, often seen in fantasy literature more generally, of "then why didn't you spell it that way?" In this case, I'll note that both the spelling and the supposed pronunciation appear vaguely French, which may be intentional - although, obviously, they don't match up with one another in that language either...

D&D Monsters: Stirges

The strige is a creature of Roman myth, derived from the earlier Greek strix. It was said to be a nocturnal bird, albeit one that hung upside down like a bat, which drank the blood of infants and possibly even ate the remains. The Greek version of the name has since been adopted as a scientific name for a genus of owl, and, blood-drinking aside, the general description does seem to match owls more than anything else that might exist in the real world. The name later also became associated with witches and with a more humanoid form of vampire, the strigoi. 

In D&D, of course, the name mutates again to the form "stirge". While it looks even less owl-like than the mythic creature, it's still clearly based on it... but is more inclined to attack adults than babies.