Do the beautiful and elegant mythical unicorn really exists at any point in time? well, today you will the answer to this one of the most asked questions.
Unicorns were real, yes they were but not quite what you have imagined or seen in fantasy books and movies. Tens of thousands of years ago, unicorns did exist. They looked more like the present-day rhino than the beautiful white horse with a horn.
In real life, the Elasmotherium sibiricum unicorn looked more like a giant, hairy rhino. The extinct creature described as a “Siberian unicorn” roamed the Earth with humans.
The discovery of real unicorns isn’t new but what is interesting is that scientists thought they died out 350,000 years ago until a fossilised skull was found in Kazakhstan.
According to a new study in the American Journal of Applied Science, they roamed the Earth much more recently than previously thought and may have lived alongside humans, according to a study.
Researchers from Russia’s Tomsk State University found a Siberian unicorn skull in Kazakhstan and dated it to around 29,000 years ago, disproving the original theory that the species went extinct 350,000 years ago.
The skull, which was remarkably well-preserved, was found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan.
Carbon dating tests concluded that the fossil is 29,000 years old – meaning the animals roamed the Earth a whopping 321,000 years longer than previously thought!
Sorry kids! but the real unicorn was just a hairy rhino. It was 1.8 metres tall, over 4 metres long and weighed more than 4 tonnes! That’s closer to woolly mammoth-sized than horse-sized. It was covered in a hairy coat and earned its name from the huge horn that grew out of its forehead.
Like the present-day rhinos, they were herbivorous and fed their giant 1.8 metres tall, four-ton frame by eating lots of grass.
The researchers are now studying how this creature was able to survive so much longer than many of its other species.