The origin of unicorns is a wishy-washy subject...nobody knows for SURE how they came to be but here are a few speculations:
from monstrous.com:
The unicorn is an archetypal monster, present both in eastern and western mythology. In the Bible, God is said to have the strength of a unicorn. [Num 23:22 & 24:8]; The warlike fierceness of the unicorn is referred to when Ephraim and Manasseh are described as being like the horns of unicorns. [Deu 33:17]; The terrifying destruction of Idumea is completed when God sends unicorns and wild bulls to attack the people. [Isa 34:8 see also Psa. 92:10 & Psa 22:21]
Modern zoologists have generally disbelieved the existence of the unicorn. Yet there are animals bearing on their heads a bony protuberance more or less like a horn, which may have given rise to the story. The rhinoceros horn, as it is called, is such a protuberance, though it does not exceed a few inches in height, and is far from agreeing with the descriptions of the horn of the unicorn. The nearest approach to a horn in the middle of the forehead is exhibited in the bony protuberance on the forehead of the giraffe; but this also is short and blunt, and is not the only horn of the animal, but a third horn, standing in front of the two others.
Other believes that the narwhales, along with the Indian Rhinoceros (which only has one ‘horn’) are creatures that, through travelers’ exaggerations, became the fabled unicorn. The narwhale is a whale that has a single tusk protruding from its forehead. One can admire two carved narwhal horn in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and in the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM); the two are thought to be a pair. The horn is 110 cm long with a diameter of 5.2 cm tapering to 2.5 cm.
The Oryx, a desert antilope, is also a potential candidate.
from wikipedia.com:
Among numerous finds of prehistoric bones found at Einhornhöhle (Unicorn Cave) in Germany's Harz Mountains, some were selected and reconstructed by the mayor, of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke, as a unicorn in 1663. Claims that the so-called unicorn had only two legs (and was constructed from fossil bones of mammoths and other animals) are contradicted or explained by accounts that souvenir-seekers plundered the skeleton; these accounts further claim that, perhaps remarkably, the souvenir-hunters left the skull, with horn. The skeleton was examined by Gottfried Leibniz, who had previously doubted the existence of the unicorn, but was convinced thereby.[13]
Baron Georges Cuvier maintained that as the unicorn was cloven-hoofed it must therefore have a cloven skull (making impossible the growth of a single horn); to disprove this, Dr. W. Franklin Dove, a University of Maine professor, artificially fused the horn buds of a calf together, creating a one-horned bull.[14]
P. T. Barnum once exhibited a unicorn skeleton, which was exposed as a hoax.
Since the rhinoceros is the only known extant land animal to possess a single horn, it has often been supposed that the unicorn legend originated from encounters between Europeans and rhinoceroses. The Woolly Rhinoceros would have been quite familiar to ice age people, or the legend may have been based on the surviving rhinoceroses of Africa. Europeans and West Asians have visited Sub-Saharan Africa for as long as we have records.
Chinese people from the time of the Han Dynasty had also visited East Africa, which may account for their odd legends of 'one-horned ogres'. The Ming Dynasty voyages of Zheng He brought back giraffes, which were identified by the Chinese with another creature from their own legends, the Qilin, a deer-like creature sometimes also depicted with a single horn.
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