Scientists have recently found a fossilized skull from a Siberian unicorn that shows the 9,000-pound creatures lived as recently as 29,000 years ago, and actually shared the earth with humans.
This unicorn looked nothing like the fairy tale version. Elasmotherium sibiricum was shaggy and looked like a modern rhinoceros, but with a huge horn. It was actually closer to wooly mammoth size than being similar to a horse, about 6.5 feet tall and 15 feet long. Its single horn was much longer than that of a modern rhino. It was very hairy as well. Not a pretty picture.
The skull was found in Kazakhstan. Researchers from Tomsk State University dated it via radiocarbon dating techniques. How the owner of the skull died is unknown but they believe it was a very old male, based on the condition and size of the skull.
The Siberian unicorn first appeared in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago, and was thought to have disappeared 350,000 years ago. The big question for researchers is how this unicorn was able to exist so much longer than the ones that died out so long ago. Team member Andrey Shpanski said, “most likely the south of Western Siberia was a refugium, where this rhino persevered the longest in comparison with the rest of its range. There is another possibility that it could migrate and dwell for a while in more southern areas.
The study of the newly-discovered unicorn skull was published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, public domain