Historic unicorns
You might have seen of this one before, for instance last summer when the image circulated in social media. But there were once scientists—German scientists, no less!—who thought they had found the bones of a unicorn and assembled them, giving us moderns something to point and laugh at. This scientific embarrassment arose in the 17th and 18th centuries. And one version of the hilarious skeletal reconstruction known as the “Magdeburg Unicorn” is on display in that eastern German city’s natural history museum.
Bones found in a quarry near Magdeburg were theorized to belong together by the Prussian scientist and inventor of the vacuum pump Otto von Guericke (1602-1686). Interestingly, the reconstructions now on display weren’t created until decades after his death, and these involved speculations on the part of the German Renaissance philosopher-scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Here, Snopes provides a brief, handy history of the creation:
With a striking horn, stout body, lengthy tail and two enormous legs, the so-called Magdeburg Unicorn has been a legend on the internet for years and has haunted the scientific community for centuries.
Every few years, the fabled unicorn makes a reappearance online when people on social media use it as an opportunity to poke fun at the hilarious evolution of science, with some going so far as to dub it “one of the worst fossil reconstructions in human history.”
The story appears to have circulated again last summer in the context of criticizing the public policy responses to Covid, which is to say, as a means of demonstrating that even the respected scientists of their day could be very wrong about sciency things. That is a convenient way to make the case against expert opinion, but it falls short in a number of aspects, even superficially.
For one thing, the understanding of fossilized bones was nowhere near today’s. Most of the bones came from the extinct woolly rhinoceros, for instance, and extinct animals hadn’t been systematically described very well. Also, the horn from the reconstruction were from a narwhal—a whale from the North Atlantic with a single tooth that extends to resemble a horn—and these horns had been seen as evidence of unicorns going back into prehistory.
Furthermore, it would be hard to think of our modern understanding of infectious disease as so sketchy and incomplete as was the understanding of fossils in the 17th century. We’ve made great strides in knowledge, for instance, and have clearly established the germ theory of disease as superior to its predecessor theory of miasma since at least the early 20th century.
As ever, interest in the past is often as much about the present and guessing about the future. But perhaps the story of the Magdeburg Unicorn is just about humans trying to come up with explanations for the world around us, and trying to work it out from the information that’s available to us, even if that information is flawed and incomplete. Or maybe sometimes we just need a good chuckle.
1/9/23
I love unicorns...I sure wish they were real....lol
Just stopping in for a quick Hi! Another crazy day at work and I was up tool late last night and am falling asleep at my desk...lol
The unicorn story is a foolish justification for anything one opposes. I don't want to have my tooth taken out because a dentist in Denmark once took out a tooth and caused an infection. I don't want to live in a house because they burn down, proven by the fire in Des Moines last week. Nonsense, though the unicorn story is kind of funny.