UNICORN

Unicorn
Long portrayed in myths and legends, the unicorn is said by some people to be a single-horned animal that was not only a real animal in ancient times but still exists today. Believers usually describe it as looking like a white horse with a horn on its forehead and report that it is incredibly gentle and shy. Because of this shyness, they say, the unicorn is an elusive creature that lives in hard-to-search places.

Indeed, in the seventeenth century there were several discoveries of what appeared to be unicorn fossils in remote areas. One of the first was in 1663 in a limestone cave near Quedlinburg, Germany. The town was close to the Harz Mountains, where an old legend told of a woman who rode on a unicorn. Therefore, many people believed that the fossil discovery was genuine, and they flocked to the cave, damaging the site before anyone could excavate the skeleton from the rock in which it rested. The fossil was damaged still further during the excavation process, but its skull, which featured a single horn 7.5 feet (2.3m) long, was intact.

Scholars theorize that this fossil represents an extinct species of stag or ox. But a few people insist that they have seen living unicorns in the area where the fossil was found, a forest so thick that an elusive animal could, theoretically, go undetected there. One such person is Austrian naturalist Antal Festetics, who claims to have captured its image on video while he was in the Harz Mountains in 1991 filming a documentary. He turned the tape over to experts at Göttingen University, where anyone can view it; despite Festetics’ claims, skeptics consider the tape a fake.

Skeptics have offered a similar explanation for the fossils: Instead of being from an extinct species of animal, they were human-made—or, more specifically, they came from living creatures made to resemble unicorns by farmers. Throughout history, in certain cultures people have turned two-horned animals into unicorns in order to mark various animals as being for a particular purpose. For example, the ancient Romans made unicorns by manipulating the two horns of a young ram or bull on a daily basis so that the horns grew together, or by burning a young animal’s scalp before the horns’ emergence so that both horns would grow out of the center of the skull instead of on the sides. The resulting horn would not have looked healthy, which means that the living animal would not have been mistaken for a natural unicorn, but the horn of such an animal, once fossilized, would easily be mistaken for a natural one.

Believers in natural unicorns, however, say that there is ample evidence that these animals once existed in the wild. Unicorns are mentioned in the Bible and in the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans and medieval European scholars, though the creature is described differently in various texts. In the sixteenth century Lodovico de Varthema, also known as Lewis Vartoman, wrote in his book Itinerario (Travel Route) that he had seen two live unicorns in the Middle Eastern city of Mecca; he described them as being fierce beasts with the bodies of horses, the heads of stags, and the legs of goats. Other scholars, both medieval and ancient, also described unicorns as being fierce, which has led some people to believe they were actually talking about the rhinoceros.

Also in ancient and medieval times, some people had objects, such as drinking cups, made from horns that were said to be from unicorns. By the time of the Renaissance, European shopkeepers were selling such horns, called alicorns, for healing purposes, claiming that when ground up, their powder had the ability to cure a variety of illnesses or ward off poisoning. Then and now, some people have taken this as proof that the animals existed. However, most of these horns were made by boiling an elephant or walrus tusk for six hours in a special solution that softened it so it could be straightened out and then twisted to simulate what a supposedly real unicorn horn looked like. Those horns that were not manufactured in this way are believed to have come from a narwhal, an arctic sea mammal that has a single elongated tooth, or tusk, that often looks like it is coming from its forehead. Indeed, in 1638 Danish zoologist Ole Wurm traced the origin of several alicorns in the European marketplace to Scandinavian fishermen. Nonetheless, believers in unicorns say that at least some of the unicorn horns in the marketplace might have been genuine—and that even if they were all fake, that still leaves open the possibility that unicorns nonetheless exist.

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