The Gheranda Samhita places ushtrasana among its prone forms. The practitioner lies face down, folds the legs back over onto the back, takes hold of the feet with the hands and draws the mouth in. Ushtra is the camel, and the folded legs above a body pressed to the ground carry the animal's hump.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not have it. Like the crocodile, the locust and the serpent, the camel belongs to the group of face down postures that the later manual adds to a repertoire the earlier one had built almost entirely out of seats. Read together, those four are the strongest internal evidence that the Gheranda Samhita was drawing on a wider range of bodily practice than its predecessor recorded.
The camel is also a marker of geography. It is an animal of the dry northwest of the subcontinent, of Rajasthan and Sindh and the routes across the Thar, rather than of the Gangetic plain where much of the hatha material circulated. The manuals do not comment on it, and the atlas draws no conclusion about where the text was compiled from a single animal name. It is recorded here as an observation about the vocabulary rather than as evidence of anything, because a naming convention built on familiar creatures will admit any creature its users had seen.