Slavic mythology, for example, has the Rusalka, which is said to be the spirit of a virginal woman or an unbaptized child tales from Western, Central, and Southern African cultures feature Mami Wata, a water spirit that is often portrayed as part mermaid, part snake charmer. Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid-and the exceptionally more cheerful Disney cartoon she inspired-is probably the most famous merperson of all time, but tales of half-human, half-fish creatures go back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, and are present in legends from cultures around the world. or manatee? / CSA Printstock/Getty Images ![]() Those unicorn horns probably came from rhinos or narwhals (whose horn is actually a big ol’ tooth, by the way). Today, scientists believe that the early descriptions of unicorns were real animals that explorers had no reference for at home, including oryxes and rhinos. But as travelers made their way to increasingly far-off lands and found no actual unicorns, that started to change. The belief that unicorns were real persisted until the 18th century. ![]() Drinking from cups made of the horns was said to protect against disease and poison. But for people of the Middle Ages, there was no doubt that these animals were real: Sailors and merchants even peddled long, white, spiraled horns that they said came from the creatures. ![]() Later, Marco Polo-who believed he had laid eyes on the creatures himself-wrote that unicorns were “very ugly brutes to look at” and could be found “wallowing in mud and slime.” In the 1500s, Conrad Gesner featured a description and illustration of the animal in an edition of his natural history text- History of the Animals in English-and like Ctesias and Pliny before him, he based his account on descriptions from explorers, not an actual specimen or an animal he saw himself. Pliny described an animal he called monokeros-or “single horn”-which he wrote had “the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead.” Similar creatures are found in Asian folktales, including-depending on the particular depiction-the qilin, a deer-like animal with the scales of a dragon and, at times, a single horn.įor quite some time, people believed unicorns weren’t actually myths, but real-life animals. In European accounts, the unicorn is a white, horse- or goat-like animal with cloven hooves and a long, spiraled horn. Single-horned creatures occur in folktales-some of them thousands of years old-in cultures around the world. They are at last taken, after they have been pierced with arrows and spears for it is impossible to capture them alive.”Ĭtesias called the animal a “wild ass,” but today, we consider this passage the first written description of a unicorn. It also had a roughly two-foot-long horn-white on the bottom and black in the middle, with a crimson red tip-growing from its forehead.Ĭatching the creature was nearly impossible, unless it could be cornered near its young-then, it wouldn’t flee, but instead, Ctesias wrote, would “butt with their horns, kick, bite, and kill many men and horses. It was large, fast, and strong, with a white body, a red head, and dark blue eyes. In the 4th century BCE, Greek physician Ctesias described a strange animal. Many real-life animals were the likely inspirations for the unicorn.
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