"These deadly sheep roam the verdant hillsides where they live, ravaging anything in their paths. From a distance, they seem to be nothing more than wild, somewhat dirty sheep. Up close, however, the sheep can be seen to have an evil nature. Their large mouths are filled with long, sharp black teeth that drip vile ichor. These sheep attack any living thing that they can find, fearing nothing and fighting to the death."
The death sheep first appeared in the issue #156 of Dragon Magazine...the April issue. The entire magazine is like a giant April Fools joke, including the bestiary or, as they refer to it, "worstiary". It includes goofy doofuses like the paper dragon, pigeontoad, killer spruce and, the coup de grâce, the death sheep.
Here's the intro: "We've seen a lot of weird monsters here at DRAGON® Magazine. We've even published some of them, like the giant vampire frog in issue #50, but some monsters we've received were so weird that we'd read one of them and think, "Jeez, nobody will ever want to see this thing!" Fat lot we knew. There were giant evil black squirrels in the Monster Manual II, and there was the flumph and the cavalier."
As far as I can tell, Mark Nelson's illustration of the death sheep is the only depiction that exists. It's an April Fool's joke so I know it's not really worth investigating but there's no creature in mythology of folklore that I can find that could have influenced this dingus. In fact the only similar thing I can find in pop culture is the 2006 New Zealand horror film Black Sheep.
I know it's a fool's errand, as this entire issue was a goof, but I tried to research deadly sheep in mythology & folklore. The closest I could find was the idea of black sheep being a bad omen or unlucky. It's not much.
Tomorrow is something that should be much more familiar and was much easier to research.
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