Since I was a child I always loved the idea of Unicorns. As being an equestrian since the age of seven, I remember vividly seeing a coffee table book entitled "Unicorns I have Known" by Robert Vavra. The beautiful photographs of these horned Equines captured my imagination. Vavra has published a wide range of adult and children's books. He is the author of over 30 books accounting for more than 3,000,000 volumes in print, in eight languages. He has had more than 100 one-man gallery displays and museum shows in America and Europe.
- Tiger Flower, 1969 (with Fleur Cowles) -
- Lion and Blue, 1974 (with Fleur Cowles) - Such Is the Real Nature of Horses, 1979
- The Love of Tiger Flower, 1980 (with Fleur Cowles)
- Unicorns I Have Known, 1983
- To Be A Unicorn, 1986 (with Fleur Cowles)
- Blanquito y Toro, 1966 (drawings by John Fulton)
- Equus: The Creation of a Horse, 1976
- Vavra's Horses, Ten of the World's Most Beautiful Equines, 1989
- The Unicorn of Kilimanjaro, 1990His work features in and on numerous publications including:
- Iberia: Spanish Travels And Reflections, James Michener
- The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
- Russian Republics postage stamps
- Max Factor, Roche, Renault and Revlon advertisements
- Stallions of the Quest (August 8, 2001)
- Michener's the Name, 2007
- Vavra's Vision, 2007
Two photographs from Robert Vavra's book "Unicorns I Have Known" (1983)
The Unicorn is in Captivity, one of The Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries, c. 1495–1505, The Cloisters.
The first written account of a Unicorn comes from the fourth century B.C.E.
It was written by Greek physician Ctesias, who had traveled through what is now Iran.
He wrote that creatures were quick and powerful. They had white bodies, red heads,
blue eyes, and a long multi-colored horn. People in history have claimed to have seen the creature. Famous sightings include those by Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, and Pliny the Elder.Descriptions of unicorns changed with every story. Most legends said that unicorns had magical powers. Some said they gave people immortality. Others claimed they had healing powers. One traditional method of hunting unicorns involved entrapment by a virgin.In one of his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote:
"The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears
to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated
damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it."
The late Gothic series of seven tapestry hangings The Hunt of the Unicorn are a high point
There, he heard many tales of single-horned wild donkeys that were as large as horses.In European tapestry manufacture, combining both secular and religious themes. The tapestries now hang in the Cloisters division of the Metropolitan museum of art in New York City. In the series, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by huntsmen and hounds, pursue a unicorn against mille-fleur backgrounds or settings of buildings and gardens. They bring the animal to bay with the help of a maiden who traps it with her charms, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, "The Unicorn in Captivity", the unicorn is shown alive again and happy, chained to a pomegranate tree surrounded by a fence, in a field of flowers. Scholars conjecture that the red stains on its flanks are not blood but rather the juice from pomegranates, which were a symbol of fertility. However, the true meaning of the mysterious resurrected unicorn in the last panel is unclear.
Today, many experts say stories about unicorns could have been Influenced by real animals. They point to the Indian rhinoceros, which is a powerful beast with one horn. Other possibilities include the wild ox, Arabian Oryx, and narwhal. The unicorn could be a mix of many animals.
After years of believing unicorns were nothing more than mystical, magical fairytale creatures, researchers definitively proved that they did once exist — though, not as pretty horses with white manes, wings, and horns.
Thanks to a discovered skull fossil found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan, we now know that the unicorn — or "Elasmotherium sibiricum" roamed the planet roughly 29,000 years ago and looked more like a rhinoceros than a horse.
The study, published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences, also revealed that these unicorns stood about six feet tall, measured 15 feet long, and weighed around 8,000 pounds. The discovery is a total shock to scientists who initially thought they had gone extinct 350,000 years ago.
"Most likely, the south of Western Siberia is where this rhino had preserved the longest in comparison with the rest of the range," Tomsk State University scientist Andrei Shpanksy noted in the research.
DNA analysis of collagen extracted from the bones of a fossil showed that the Siberian Unicorn belonged to a sister taxon to Rhinocerotinae, the group to which all modern rhinoceros belong. The two were thought to have split about thirty-five million years ago but may even have been as late as forty-seven million years ago.
The unicorn might not be very old at all and might have still been kicking until 39,000 years ago. This places its extinction “firmly within the late Quaternary extinction event”, between 50,000 and four thousand years ago, in which half of the Eurasian mammalian megafauna died out. Interestingly, this adds to the evidence of the decline of megafauna just before the ice sheets of the last ice age reached their maximum extension.
This might help us to understand the reasons for the unicorn’s demise.
The shape of, and the isotopes within, the remains of E. sibiricum suggest that it found its home in herb- and grass-covered steppes, with an extreme adaptation for feeding close to the ground. Perhaps it dug up vegetation to consume its roots and all.
However, starting about 35 thousand years ago, as the deep cold extended further south, the steppe became more like a tundra, denying the unicorn its primary food source, and this was perhaps a decisive factor in its extinction.
The researchers also speculated that humans might have had something to do with it, although they acknowledge a dearth of supporting evidence. “The extinction of E. sibiricum,” they write, “could, in theory, have been exacerbated by human hunting pressure, given the replacement of H. neanderthalensis by H. sapiens in Eurasia around 45–40 [thousand years ago]”.
While no horn has ever been found, it is thought that the large boss on the head supported one © Igor Doronin/Kosintsev et al. 2018
Sources
https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/are-unicorns-real
https://www.ancientmedicine.org/home/2019/3/26/aristotle-on-ctesias-on-the-manticore-and-unicorn
https://magazine.washington.edu/studying-narwhals-is-no-easy-tusk/
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/november/the-siberian-unicorn-lived-at-the-same-time-as-modern-humans.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Vavra
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