Throughout the jolting history of science , there have beenmore than a fair shareof blunders , embarrassments , and shameful screw ups . However , few fare more hilarious than the valiant try of natural account in 17th - century Germany and its unwavering belief in the menial unicorn .
If you pay a visit to the Natural History Museum Magdeburg , you ’ll undoubtedly notice a foreign “ unicorn ” specimen . Of course , the skeleton was not actually a mythical beast . It was , in fact , awoolly rhinoceros , an extinct metal money that cast throughout much of Eurasia until the end of the last Ice Age .
Sure , this spineless species might just depend like a secondhand Lego model put together without an pedagogy manual of arms , but these strange bones managed to fool some of the shiny brains of seventeenth - C Germany .
The bones were first found in a cave near the mountain town of Quedlinburg in 1663 . The sensational discovery caught the tending ofOtto von Geuricke , the Prussian scientist who excogitate the vacuum heart , who concluded that the incomplete skeleton was , indeed , a unicorn .
Reports of the skeleton later ended up as an illustration from a leger by renowned German polymathGottfried Leibniz , which was used as the teaching manual of arms for this fussy masterpiece . As excuse in an article in the journalNature , Leibniz was also immediate to climb up to the conclusion that the unusual bones were a Chimaera of many known creatures , just like the legendary unicorn .
“ The horn , together with the head , several ribs , dorsal vertebrae , and bones were brought to the township ’s serene abbess , ” he wrote in his geology and natural history bookProtogaea .
“ One is thus inclined to suspect that nature , using volcanoes as furnace and peck as alembics , has attain in her mighty work what we play at with our little examples in laboratories . ”
Needless to say , this monstrosity show oddity did n’t stand up to much examination over the centuries . now , the unicorn is nothing more than a viral laughing lineage . Back in spring last year , on April Fool ’s 24-hour interval , the skeleton was even the capable ofan Aprils fall guy ’s prankby the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology Saxony - Anhalt .
They claimed that scientists had carry out new desoxyribonucleic acid grounds on the bones and discovered that it was an out specie know asMonoceros mendaciloquus , a rare Pleistocene hoof it animate being whose last descendent pass in the late Middle Ages .
Thankfully , very few German scientist fell for the joke .
