Unicorns Were Real And Once Walked The Earth With Humans According To New Fossil Findings

Unicorns are mythical creatures that captured our collective imagination for decades. And while it’s true that they are regarded as fictional and mytical creatures, historians believe that their legend and myth were inspired by a specific animal species that once roamed the Earth.

The general consensus among experts suggests that this creature is the Siberian unicorn (Elasmotherium sibiricum), an animal species previously believed to have lived on the planet 350,000 years ago. Since experts claim that the earliest humans walked the Earth 200,000 years ago, it only follows to assume that the Siberian unicorn had never lived alongside our earliest human ancestors.

The Siberian unicorn, however, is not the unicorn we’ve known from fairy tales and bedside stories (and for that I apologize). For starters, this “unicorn” is not a horse, but likely a combination of the rhinoceros and the woolly mammoth. A more accurate description would be that the unicorn is the woollier cousin of rhinos.

Siberian rhinoceros 'unicorn' may have lived alongside humans (Wired UK) https://t.co/bMINnrEORm

— Helping Rhinos ? (@HelpingRhinos) March 30, 2016

Early descriptions state that the average Siberian unicorn stood 6.5 feet tall, measured 15 feet long, and weighed four tons. Not exactly a creature one can associate with rainbows and sunshine.

But now there is a recent fossil discovery suggesting that the Siberian unicorn and humans both walked the Earth together, as reported in Live Science.

A research published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences describes a newly-discovered and well-preserved skull of a male Siberian unicorn found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan. Based on the size and condition of the skull, the unicorn in question is likely an old male. The researchers are unsure as yet on what caused the Siberian unicorn’s death.

According to the study, the Siberian unicorns, despite their fierce appearance, were vegetarians. Their natural habitat extended from the Don River to the east Kazakhstan.

Using radiocarbon dating techniques, researchers at Tomsk State University discovered that the “unicorn” fossil lived about 29,000 years ago, as opposed to the previously-believed 350,000. Since the earliest humans walked the planet 200,000 years ago, the researchers can now conclude that Siberian unicorns and humans lived on Earth together.

What researchers are interested in finding out now is how this unicorn was able to outlast those that died hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

“Most likely, the south of Western Siberia was a refúgium, where this rhino persevered the longest in comparison with the rest of its range,” said one of the team, Andrey Shpanski. “There is another possibility that it could migrate and dwell for a while in the more southern areas.”

The researchers want to find out more about the environmental conditions that led to the extinction of the Siberian unicorn. By doing so, scientists would be able to understand better the world’s environment as it stands now, thus giving them the required information that can help us figure out the necessary steps in surviving climate change.

Knowing all this now, it’s fascinating how the popular notion of unicorns is always associated with magic. It’s also worth noting how mythical unicorns were always depicted as horses.

The last Siberian unicorn looked nothing like this: https://t.co/Bo1OMEDDUV pic.twitter.com/35frCgnuA0

— Kyle Hill (@Sci_Phile) March 29, 2016

Unicorns look nothing like the ones Lisa Frank created, and are instead terrifying: https://t.co/JVCYCqU0vt pic.twitter.com/X4n6y6O6wL

— E! News (@enews) March 30, 2016

Interestingly, the ancient Greeks were entirely convinced that unicorns were real. The earliest description of unicorns came from Ctesias’s book Indika, which described the creatures as “wild asses, fleet of foot, having a horn a cubit and a half (700 mm, 28 inches) in length, and colored white, red and black.”

During the sixth century, Alexandrian merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes made a voyage to India to write works on cosmology. His description of the unicorn was based on the four brass figures found in the palace of Ethiopia, which is as follows: “it is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive; and that all its strength lies in its horn. When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture, it throws itself from a precipice, and turns so aptly in falling, that it receives all the shock upon the horn, and so escapes safe and sound.”

[Image via Henry Guttmann/Getty Images]