A History of Unicorns

Among the most familiar of creatures in the entire pantheon of legend and mythology is the unicorn, an animal so ubiquitous that you won’t need me to provide a description of what it’s meant to look like. Caption: here’s where we’re at with unicorns today. Associated with artfulness, often quirkiness and partly with young girls. Images: used under fair use. Unicorns have pivotal roles in mythology, fantasy and fiction. But they sound just about ‘real’ enough that zoologists have long written about them and aimed to work out what they might have been based on, always assuming that there was a real animal, or perhaps more than one, at the base of the whole story. I’ve had reason to talk and write about unicorns a few times, and my sometime role as a commentator on cryptozoology, animal mythology and the history of palaeontology means that I’ve occasionally had direct interaction with art, artifacts and even fossils connected to unicorn lore. I thought it would be worth compiling my…