Unicorns of the Natural World

While the unicorn itself is a creature of fantasy and legend, one-horned and one-tusked animals do reside in the natural world. Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they examine several extant and extinct species noted for their solitary protrusions  -- including the narwhal and a certain circus unicorn. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Shoe mccorm making. We're back for part two of our
two part exploration of the Unicorn, and it's mighty horn.

(00:23):
That's right now. I want you to imagine yourself in
a in a medieval scenario. Robert, I know you're always
game for that. All right, Let's do it. Okay, I'm
I'm I'm a medieval individual world it only by fire. Uh,
probably not that clean. Let's do it. Well. You're you
think of yourself as a young Viking, could be a
young Viking on a sea voyage, and maybe the early

(00:44):
Middle Ages, and you bravely sail the icy waters of
the Arctic. Your head's full of Norse mythology about ice
bound monsters and beasts that could lie waiting behind the
icebergs the Great North. And one day, on this boreal voyage,
you look out for the water, and maybe a hundred
yards out, you see among gaps in the pack ice,

(01:04):
a site you cannot possibly explain, dueling swords reaching just
out of the water. So you see dozens of blades
crossing and scraping one another in battle, poking just out
of the waves, as if there are nights or vikings
or whatever with spears and sabers fighting one another, maybe

(01:25):
as some kind of like icy mayor people out there.
So obviously you're thinking what could that be? But of
course the captain of the boat, being a little more
experienced than you, says, boys, we're rich. Now why would
that be? Well, I'm guessing because those creatures over there,
they seem to have something like a unicorn horn on them. Uh,

(01:47):
that's gonna be worth a lot of money to various collectors,
um magicians, etcetera. That is right, we are rich, boys,
for the horn of the unicorn is worth more than
its weight in gold, and for buyers of fraudulent unicorn
horns in the Middle Ages in Europe, that was absolutely
true and medieval in early modern Europe, vikings were running

(02:10):
a terrific scam, trading in fake unicorn tusks that were
literally worth more than their weight in gold. So I
was reading a two thousand five New York Times article
by one William J. Broad who writes about how in
the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth of England was gifted a
possession of a narwhal tusk, and nor wal tusks of
the time were valuated about ten thousand pounds, which he

(02:33):
writes was roughly the cost of an entire castle, So
like one tusk you basically get a castle with. Broad
also writes that there's an Austrian legend that Kaiser Karl
the fifth paid down the nation's national debt with two
unicorn tusks. But these tusks were being brought down from
somewhere up in the north by Vikings and being sold

(02:56):
to the rich and gullible of Europe. What was going on?
What were these tusks poking up out of the water
that was allowing the Vikings to run this beautiful scam. Well,
this was not the horn of the fabled unicorn. It
was the tusk of the narwhal. Yes, now, the norwhale
might very well be, I would say, the most unicorn

(03:16):
like animal without legs. Yeah, it is. It is the
creature that has this long, kind of spirally horn, or
of what appears to be a horn when you look
at it with the unicorn myth, you know, troloping around
your head. It is the only creature that has something
like that horn, and it goes great with the older

(03:36):
stories of the unicorn, Like we talked in the last
episode about the ancient world stories of the unicorn that
had like a unicorn that was two cubits long, gigantic,
you know, at least three feet. Actually, narwhal horns can
get much longer than that. So the norwhale is a
marine mammal. It's a porpoise in the carnivorous order of
odonta city or the toothed whales, and narwhal's live exclusively

(04:00):
up in the Arctic, up around Greenland and northern Canada,
so they're not going to be normally recognized by the
folk of Europe unless they are, say, uh, you know,
travelers in the Northern Beyond, or they're they're very learned
in the stories of travelers of the North. And they're
actually best recognized for these tusks, which show a classic

(04:22):
unicorn like helical growth pattern. You mentioned there was a
spiral texture to them, and these tusks can grow up
to almost three meters or about nine ft long. If
you just try to picture that in your head, like
this is a unicorn horn that's taller than any human. Yeah,
and you can. You can definitely see how this may
have influenced some of those depictions of unicorns we mentioned

(04:44):
how and some of some paints, especially are modern UH
paintings and artistic depictions of unicorns. You see a shorter horn,
but in some of these medieval tapestries it is like
a narwall horn. It is like a javelin. Yeah, just
gigantic as long as the thing's body. The scientific name
of the narwhale is Monodon mono serras, and given previous

(05:05):
Greek etymology discussions, it's pretty obvious where the name comes
from here. But monodon means one tooth and monoserras means
one horn, so it's literally pretty much the sea unicorn,
the unicorn whale, And according to the Arctic ecologist Dr
Kristen Ladra, the the actual word narwhale. I didn't know
this before reading some of her work. It comes from

(05:28):
the Norse prefix nar, which means corpse, and then vall,
which means whale, So the narwhale literally means the corpse whale.
And this comes from how they apparently looked to these
Norse explorers of the Vikings sailing around in the northern seas.
They would see the speckled kind of coloration patterns on

(05:48):
the narwhal and think it looked like a washed up
dead body or a drowned sailor. That is fascinating, because
they do. The narwhale does look kind of ghastly, especially
if you compared to something like a uga whale, which
seems to have been just carved out of out of
out of marble, so white and pure. You know. Yeah,
in the last episode, we were talking about how many

(06:09):
of the ancient descriptions of unicorns described them as much
more colorful, you know, that they're like purple or black
and red and yellow and orange. And I like that
idea of the very colorful unicorn. I don't know why
it is that we've ended up with the modern picture
of the unicorn being this bleach white, you know, bone
colored kind of creature. I mean, the only the only

(06:30):
thing I can think is that we kind of merged
our idea of the perfect unicorn with the with with
the worship of the white horses, the white horse being
the the ultimate in equine beauty. Well, I happen to
prefer more colorful horses as well, I guess, But yeah,
you've got these porpoises, these marine mammals dwelling up in
the Arctic with these tusks, and the tusks are found

(06:53):
mostly on males, also occasionally on females, and in bygone days,
this tusk was often harvested and sold on the magic
market as a unicorn horn. And here's actually my favorite
fact about the narwhals tusk. If you look up pictures
of the narwhal's face, you might notice something that doesn't
quite line up with the unicorn iconography usually, which is

(07:17):
that the unicorn's got the horn right in the middle
of its head, right, it's above the eyes, poking straight
out from the middle. You'll notice that the tusk of
the narwhal doesn't actually grow straight out from the middle
of the face like a unicorn's horn does. Instead, it
is off center, emerging from one side of the face,
not above the eyes, but below the eyes. Why is that, Well,

(07:40):
there's actually a very good reason. Here's another clue. Occasionally
nar walls can be found with two tusks growing side
by side. This is very rare, but it does occasionally happen.
Why does that happen? The answer is that the narwhals
tusk is not a horn at all. It is a
single gigantic overgrown tooth, a canine or pre molar tooth,

(08:04):
which grows straight outward punctures through the narwhal's upper lips.
So it's like that illustration from the Simpsons. And he
has shown, you know, the Book of British teeth Um,
where the tooth is like growing up through the head.
That's literally what's going on here. The narwhal's tooth grows
straight out punctures through the lip and then goes nine

(08:26):
feet out in front of it. This is literally a
mammal with one gigantic forward facing fang growing in a
counterclockwise spiral poking through the skin. I love it, and
I wish our movie vampires were more like that. That
is the fang world I want. Well, this reminds me
of the Babarusa. The babarusa about that, well, the Babarusa

(08:48):
the deer pig, if you will. The males have their
their tusks growing out of the top of their snout
and curling back over. And these are these are canine
to usks that actually pierced the flesh in the snout
and the kind of twirl in this kind of curl
in this tortuous manner. That's kind of messed up design

(09:08):
man well nested up or perfect in its own way.
But but that's kind of the interesting thing here, right,
that the unicorn being a creature of myth is perfectly
symmetrical and uh and and pure and it's it's composition.
But in reality, reality is asymmetrical. Reality is a place
where tusk grow through lips and out of the top

(09:30):
of a pig snout. That's right nature. It smashes through walls,
it breaks down barriers, it punctures through lips. Now, generally
when this happens in the norm whale, the tusk grows
out of the left canine while the right canine stays
embedded in the mouth. And otherwise, normals don't have any
teeth protruding into the mouth, so they don't use teeth
for eating or chewing. They suck their food up into

(09:51):
their mouth like a vacuum cleaner, or like sperm whales.
And I think this fact about the tusk is actually
just a huge fang. It is a huge tooth. Is
probably the reason why so many of the people publishing
academic research on our walls seem to be not just
marine zoologists and biologists, but dentists. Now, this beautiful sea unicorn,

(10:11):
you might tend to assume, Okay, what is a tusk
like that good for? It's got to be a weapon,
right right, Yeah, because we think of I mean, if
you think of the unicorn, you imagine the unicorn skewering
its enemies with that thing. Right, Wait, do you imagine that?
What do you imagine the unicorn uses its horn for?
If anything? Well, actually you would probably assume that it
uses it to purify water and to heal noble adventurers

(10:33):
in their quest. But you have seeing I think it
was a cabin in the woods. Cabin there's a character
because is skewered by the rampaging unicorn. Yeah, as the
Cinobyites and all of the you know guys from the
Strangers with creepy masks and the zombies and everything are
running about, there's also a majestic unicorn that comes packed
with its own rays of light. But it gallops down

(10:54):
the hall and just impales a guy with its horn. Yeah,
but otherwise you would imagine that the unicorn's horn would
would just heal people and maybe shoe laser beams. Yeah, exactly.
So you probably think narwhale, it's got to be a spear, right.
It works as a spear. It's a perfect natural spear
for skewering prey. And these are, of course carnivorous marine mammals.
They eat fish, they eat squid, things like that, things

(11:14):
that you could technically skewer if you wanted to. But
you should think about the logistics of this for a
second before you think that that's how it's used, because
imagine how precise you would have to be to aim
a spear that's nine ft long attached rigidly to the
front of your face to skewer a fish that's small
enough for you to eat. Then, on top of that,

(11:34):
think about if you spear to fish, how would you
get it. You'd have to somehow get it off of
the end of your nine foot spear, and you don't
have hands right like, and I say it got stuck
halfway like this, this sort of shish kebab method of hunting.
There are a number of problems with it. And you've
got a rotting fish stuck in front of your face.
It's always like flying off in your eyes. It's like

(11:56):
what if you wore a ring toss on your your head,
and then someone through a donut onto it, and you
did not have arms with which to retrieve the donut,
how would you possibly eat it? That is a wonderful analogy.
That's that's perfect. It's a problem that many of us
face in our real life. Well, if it's not actually
used for spearing, what is this tusk actually for? If

(12:17):
you know, obviously the narwhal didn't evolve it so that
the narwhal could be killed and have its tusk harvested
and sold to gullible buyers in the medieval European you know,
luxury market. So one hypothesis is that it was used
as an ice pick. Right. They live in Arctic regions
where the water is often covered with pack ice, so
you might think that maybe the tusk was used for

(12:38):
breaking up ice cover. But I couldn't find any evidence
that anybody has ever observed this, So I think this
is a lower rung hypothesis. But it's like it's still
we can see where one might wonder if this is
the reason, because if it's not used to manipulate prey,
then perhaps it is used to manipulate the environment. Well,
whether or not it's used to manipulate prey in some way.

(13:01):
We'll get to that in a second. So another big
thought is that, oh, it's got to be a product
of sexual selection, right, Females are selecting for males with
larger and larger tusks over generations because they're attracted to it.
I mean, we already mentioned that they the female sometimes
but don't always have them. This is primarily male narwhals.
So anytime there is a strong sexual dimorphism like that,

(13:23):
you've got to think that sexual selection probably plays some
kind of role. And Darwin thought this was a good explanation.
It remains commonly accepted among the hypotheses for the purpose
of the narwhal's tusk, and it's suspected that this does
play some role for several reasons, including observed behavior. According
to Dr Kristen Ladra, who I mentioned earlier in the
summer months, researchers will observe male narwhal's crossing their tusks

(13:49):
and making a strange kind of whistling sound, often with
a female between them, and she says quote such behavior
might help maintain dominance hierarchies or help young males develop
skills necessary for performance in adult sexual roles. So there's
some kind of some kind of showdowns, some kind of
macho display going on here where you're dueling with your tusks,

(14:10):
like I mentioned in the opening scenario. All right, and
this is something we see that it definitely matches up
with with other creatures of the earth. Absolutely lots of
creatures that have horns. In fact, the horns are involved
in male kind of hierarchy and dominance displays. Now, another
piece of evidence that there's a sexual role here, is
something in sexual selection and mate choice is the tusk

(14:30):
length seems to be correlated with sexual virility in males.
According to a paper published in Marine Mammal Science by
Trish Kelly at all quote, reproductive tracks from beluga and
narwhal were collected between nine and two thousand eight from
five beluga stocks and two nar whale stocks across the
Canadian Arctic. And what do they find about the narwhals

(14:52):
well quote, A significant relationship was found between narwhal tusk
length and testies mass, indicating the tusk maybe important in
female mate choice. So if you're a male narwhale, there's
a general correlation that the longer your tusk, the larger
your testicles. All right, well, so this sounds like a
strong theory then, right, so this is a good one.

(15:13):
It still remains very much on the table. But also
marine zoologists have continued to wonder could there be some
kind of direct adaptive value as well that plays a
role in survival. Uh So, to mention a couple more things,
there's a question of is this tusk used as a
sense organ? There is some indication that yes, it is
used as a sense organ. Martin Nuia of Harvard's School

(15:35):
of Dental Medicine has done extensive research on the nar
wall over the years, and he and his colleagues found
that the Narwal's tusk is full of these millions of
sensitive nerve endings. It's a very sensitive organ, kind of
like an inside out tooth. And Nuilla has demonstrated more
recently through experiments that is in vivo experiments, actually that
these neural pathways allowing the tusk to transmit information back

(15:57):
to the brain. Apparently they're used to transmit at least
information about changes in the salinity of water. Huh. Well,
I do have to say that the mere detail that
they are all these nerve endings in in the tusk,
it makes it seem like it would be a very
poor choice of of of saber for a duel, right,

(16:18):
you wouldn't You wouldn't want like a sword that feels pain? Yeah, Like, hey, uh,
do you have one of these giant inside out teeth
like I do. Let's start bumping them together and see
how we feel about it. And yet they do it.
One last interesting thing is it used in hunting? Even
if it's not used as a spear for skeering, there
are some indications that yes. Now, one hypothesis is that

(16:39):
the tusk somehow aids in echolocation nor walls. Like a
lot of other marine mammals, have sound based prey location strategies,
and they map their surroundings and follow food animals by
making these buzzing, clicking sounds that echo throughout the water
and then bounce back to the narwhale, carrying information about
what's nearby. Wales have very effe active and very sensitive echolocation,

(17:02):
so it's possible the tusk could play some kind of
role in helping sharpen this sound based mapping skill. It's
kind of an antennae. Could could be possible, but we
don't know that yet. But what about is a more
direct offensive weapon for hunting. Obviously the spearing theory doesn't work.
But just recently in a group of Canadian researchers captured

(17:22):
for the first time ever drone footage of male nar
walls using their tusks for hunting, not as spears, but
as a kind of stunned baton. So the narwhals we're
tracking a school of Arctic cod in this footage from overhead,
and as they pursued the prey, they would position their
tusk tips alongside a cod and then give the cod

(17:43):
a good solid whack with the tusk, which appeared to
stun the fish, and then the fish would stop moving,
and then the narwhale would swoop in and suck the
fish into its mouth. Okay, so this is interesting. It
kind of it kind of like would would pop up
behind the fish, reach up with its its tusk and
then just give it a good whack just enough to
to to throw it off so that it can then

(18:04):
suck it in exactly. Now, this tap hunting strategy can't
be essential to narwhal hunting survival, right because how would
the tuskless females eat, But it looks like this might
be some kind of supplemental preparatory strategy. It's like, you know,
it's guilding the lily food acquisition wise. And but one
thing that I think is interesting is that the normal tusk,

(18:25):
while a fake unicorn horn that did not actually have
magical properties, I think in the biological sense, is in
fact quite magical. Look at all of these properties it
to some degree may have or probably has. It may
have this powerful role in signaling sexual selection traits. It
may play a role in displaying dominance for males over
each other. It does appear to play some role in hunting.

(18:48):
It may play a role in sensing the environment. That
is fascinating. Yeah, And it does remind us of the
situation with any organism that is going to having to
have a tusk, girl worn or some sort of notable appendage,
like there has to be a reason that there has
to be an advantage in having it, otherwise we would

(19:08):
make no sense for that much energy to go into
its growth exactly. And so I think the male narwhal's
tusk is actually a wonderful example of like a pluripotent adaptation,
a thing where we're searching for the one thing it does,
but actually the more we look, the more it looks
like there are a lot of things it does. It's
a magic bag of tricks. All right. Well, on that note,

(19:29):
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come
back we will discuss a few more natural world organisms
that have something like a unicorn horn. Thank so, in
the first episode we talked a good bit about bulls,
so I don't think we really have to go into
that all that much. But basically the idea being if

(19:50):
you had a depiction of a bull that dough was
was a profile and made it look like it had
one horn, then that could be the origin of your unicorn.
You could also, of course, just have have tales of
actual one horned animals such as the rhinoceros of course,
and uh and and we we do find lots of

(20:11):
early accounts depictions of rhinos. One that I came across
eleventh century Arab poly math al Baroni wrote of a
unicorn quote of the build of a buffalo with black
scaly skin, a dew lap, and a single horn bent upwards,
which sounds a lot like a rhino, especially like an
Indian rhino, which has the one nos horn. Yeah. Now

(20:33):
another theory, and I've mentioned this one on the show
a couple of times, is that perhaps all these tales
of the unicorn. And I'm not saying I really buy this,
but I think it's an interesting theory. Is that essentially
we're describing traditions and uh and and sort of you know,
race memories. I guess you would say of the Elasma theorium. Now,

(20:54):
the elasmotherorium itself could not really appear in history, right. Well,
that the thinking for a long time that you would
have to just be going upon like fossil remains of
the Elasma theoreum, because previously we as most estimates placed
it outside of the two hundred thousand year run of
human history. But there was a recent study that took place.

(21:17):
It looked at the possible origins of the Elasma theorum
in modern day um Kazakhstan that would place it merely
twenty nine thousand years ago. So this would uh, this
was the study published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences.
So that gives us a little more room for consideration
of the Elasma theorium. Like actual human encounters with the

(21:40):
Elasma theorium is providing some basis for our unicorn myths,
so they could at least contribute to oral folklore archetypes,
even if this is before written history, right. But again,
I think the problem with this is you're kind of
going to elaborate lengths to to establish human traditions and
human tales of single horned animals when you have other

(22:04):
single horned animals that you don't have to uh, you know,
you don't have to to do as much math to
figure out you can just stick with the Indian rhino
as the example of of a beast that people were seeing,
and then word of is is traveling across the world,
you know. I'm also very convinced by the possibility that
it was inspired by misinterpretations of art. The more I

(22:26):
think about that Frederick Strader idea that somebody saw representations
of animals depicted in profile with two horns that were
rendered as just one horn because they were on top
of each other in the perspective from which they were drawn,
and that created the idea of one horned beasts lying
somewhere out there elsewhere in the world. I think that

(22:48):
that seems highly possible to me. Now that being said,
there is another prehistoric creature that we can look to
as a as a potential precursor to the unicorn. And
that is a prehistoric pig genus from the Miocene epoch
that's twenty three to five point three million years ago
that was found in Eurasia, and the males had a
mono horn. It's called the kuban atreus. And it does,

(23:11):
in fact look like a large prehistoric pig with a
unicorn horn. I mean a unicorn horn has b uh
exaggerating a bit, but it had a single horn like
protrusion from the top of its head as well as
I believe a couple of smaller ones near its eyes,
but one that definitely stands out. Yeah, in the illustrations
and skeletons that I've seen of this, it is much

(23:34):
smaller than the unicorn horn is generally understood to be. Like,
it's more like kind of a big nub over the eyes.
But if you were just if you're just looking for
examples of unicorn like skulls in the fossil record, that
this is a creature you can point out and go at. Uh. Now,
if you spend your time at any of the major

(23:57):
aquariums out there, then you may have encountered the unicorn
ish Uh, is that different than somebody just thinking in
our wall as a fish. No, No, these are These
are actual fish, and you'll you'll find them at a
number of aquariums. They have them at the Georgia Aquarium,
for instance. And specifically, we're talking seventeen species of the
Nasso genus, and they all have a frontal horn that

(24:19):
protrudes from their forehead. It really looks like a nose.
It looks like they look like snooty butlers. They've got
their nose turned up and they're like, oh, riff ruff.
Of course, when we look at it, we have the
same situation with an oar wall. Why is this here?
It's it's so large that there's a lot of energy

(24:39):
going into the production of this this this horn like protrusion.
What purpose does it play? Well, it's not used as
a weapon or a swimming aid. It seems like it's
probably used as a just a courtship feature, used by
males as a social and reproductive feature, and it, along
with other parts of their body, change colors during their

(25:01):
courtship displays. I think a lot of the times you
see a horn on the head or a horn on
the face or something like that, a major function of
it will be some kind of uh, sexual competition or
mate selection kind of role. Right. But then the added
feature here is those that it changes colors, and in
a way that's that's so unicorn, that's that's what I

(25:22):
want to see my fantasy newcorns doing whipping out there,
you know, the whipping their magical horns around in the
air and watching all sorts of crazy colors displayed through it. Well,
it's like the Lisa Frankie unicorn. When you tilt your
what are those things called your traffer keeper, you know,
the thing where you tilt it and the colors change.
What is that? Oh? Um, like with glitter, like there's

(25:45):
a there's there's liquid in there. No, don't you remember
these things there were every where in the nineties. Will
be like a plastic covering of some kind of image,
and when you tilt it up and down in the
lightwood shift, the colors on it would change like a
homographic image. Maybe maybe it was just magic. It was
just pure unicorn magic, Joe, that's obviously. Now we have
some other unicorn like creatures just to roll through here,

(26:08):
there's the Texas unicorn mantis. This is a manted species
with horn like protuberants on its head. It's popular with
pet owners because they prey on smaller insects and so
they they don't cannibalize each other as much. But other
than that, no real magical unicorn properties that I could uncover. Now,
we don't think that inspired unicorn, like the it's quite

(26:31):
the reversal in a way. It's like someone saw it
and they said, hey, that mantis kind of looks like
a unicorn. Let's call it such. And then in a
in a you know, you know, kind of a curious
call back to our discussion of the movie Legend, you
have the goblin spiders of the genus unicorn. Thank you
for taking us here, and they these spiders, these are

(26:51):
like jumping spiders, and they have really interesting examples of
sexual dimorphism, including these male clypeel horns or injections on
their heads that occur between the eyes and the jaws.
So it's more kind of like a nose. Yeah, yeah,
pretty much, and again is not used in any way
like a unicorn horn. H Then you also have unicorn shrimp,

(27:14):
and these are just shrimp that have an elongated horn
like roastrum that extends in front of its eyes. Now,
other crustaceans have this pointy bit as well, it's just
elongated in this species. Thus, the nod to the unicorn,
or actually it's a it's it's scientific name, is a
nod to the narwhale. It is pleasant anika narvall so

(27:35):
pleasi unica corpse whale. Yes, and people put in that
slime all over everything. Now I got to bring the
bad corpse whale vibes in on some honest shrimp. God.
The idea of of corpse whales being sighted from a
Viking ship, it's it's like, that's that's some some serious
Norse energy there that I want to see reflected u

(27:57):
in one of these Viking TV shows. Somebody should create
a really good, like medieval Viking water horror movie. It's
like the cross between Dagon and Vikings the corpse whales.
You know, as long as we're thinking about real live
creatures that could have inspired unicorn legends, one thing we
haven't really talked about is anomalies. Oh yes, like birth

(28:19):
effects and injuries. Yeah. Well, I mean one of the
things that we've just sort of been assuming is that
if there were some kind of creature that inspired unicorn, legends.
It was probably like a creature as it normally typically appears.
But just one example I want to mention in two
thousand and eight and apparently mutant deer with a single
horn in the middle of the top of its head

(28:41):
was found in a nature preserve in Italy. Their news
reports about it at the time they were calling it
the unicorn deer. It was, you know, one of those
weird little splashes in the press about here's an odd animal.
And it wasn't like this is how this breed of
unicorn is. It just happened to be a single individual
deer with a mutation which I think could ease really
be part of the inspiration too. I mean, mutations like

(29:03):
that probably occurred in some small number of cases throughout history.
And people see something like that and they think it's
some rare, unusual animal that there, and then there are
other ones like it out there. Or perhaps you're a
goat hurd and you you observe this birth defect in
one of your goats, and on one hand, you you
know that this creature wasn't going to survive, and then

(29:23):
this is essentially the appearance of a of an unfit goat.
But then perhaps you cannot help, but imagine what you
have a creature like this, we're healthy? What if that?
What if this creature were to survive and thrive in
our world? What kind of fabulous beast would that be?
What kind of virgin could I use to betray it
and kill it? Well, on that note, Joe, let's take

(29:45):
one more break, and when we come back, we will
talk of the wizard and the unicorn. Thank thank you,
thank God. All right, we're back. So, Robert, do you
remember ads TV commercials in the nineteen eighties for the
Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus tours. Yes, yes,
I believe so. Yeah. So I actually had a gigantic

(30:08):
Ringling Brothers poster in my room when I was a kid,
even though I don't remember ever actually going. I think
I get the poster as a gift. That's just one
of those weird kind of gifts you get when you're
a kid. That doesn't make any sense. Um, I guess
there's still gifts like that adults give right, It's probably
best I think that I didn't make those memories of
the Ringling Brothers circus itself, because if you go back

(30:32):
and watch those commercials. Now, my god, they are frightening,
and I honestly do not want to give in too
much to the clowns are scary meme because hey, I'm
pro clowns. Actually, uh, you know, there's nothing necessarily wrong
with clowns. I think people have leaned too hard into
the clowns are creepy thing. Yeah. I feel like I've
probably gotten on this tangent before, but my main points

(30:52):
are always clowns are for kids. They're not for the
grown ups. And it's the grown ups that are creating
all the creepy clown things, because it's the grown ups
who can't help but twist their innocence of childhood into
something warped. It's the it's the grown ups who hunt
the unicorn. Uh. And then also, there are so many clowns,
Like if you're basing this on like old footage of

(31:12):
creepy clowns such is from this commercial, you're not basing
them on, say, clowns that are currently going to hospitals
and helping kids work through uh you know, the recovery. Yeah,
I think the all clowns are creepy thing comes out
of this, I don't know, overpowering nihilistic energy of irony
culture run a mock. Uh it's yeah. Not all clowns
are that bad, come on, give them a chance. But

(31:34):
these clowns in these commercials, I'm sorry. They're just these
armies of dingy nightmare clowns that look like when you
see them moving and like looking into the camera, it
seems like the Unsolved Mysteries theme should play in the background.
It's just terrible. Well, they were, I guess, kind of
nostalgic clowns even then, right, they were. They were supposed

(31:54):
to look like clowns of a of a of a
bygone age. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to insult
those actual performers. I think a lot of it is
probably like the colors and how it comes through in
a TV commercial of the nineteen eighties. Nothing looks good
in the TV commercial in eighties. I mean, I'm sure
in the eighties like McDonald's probably tasted good, but you
look at those commercials, it's like, get it away. But anyway,

(32:17):
we're getting totally sidetracked, and that's my fault. In the
mid nineteen eighties, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey
Circus debuted a pretty weird new animal superstar. They you
might remember they'd have like a big elephant for this
tour or something like that. And in ninetive a supposed
real life unicorn named Lancelot became the Ringling Brothers and

(32:41):
Barnum and Bailey big big attraction. And you can look
up pictures of Lancelot today. He looks like a pale, white,
fluffy goat with long, luxurious hair and a huge brown
single horn sticking up from the top of his head
roughly about a foot or so long. Well, that sounds

(33:01):
like many depictions of the unicorn. It sounds essentially like
the unicorn that we see in one of the tapestries
we discussed in the last episode. Exactly right, is this
this nice, beardy, white goat with a big horn in
the middle of its head. And the thing is, the
horn looks kind of real. So the Ringling Brothers official
story for how they acquired Lancelot the unicorn was interesting.

(33:24):
Of course, after they started displaying this unicorn quote in
shows and commercials, animal rights groups got kind of suspicious.
But a Circus spokesperson, Joe Gold told reporters in March nineteen, quote,
it's a living unicorn that appeared in Houston, Texas in July.
It wandered up to the tent and circus producer Kenneth
Feld was there to see it. It's magical. Even Heather,

(33:48):
the unicorns trainer says she can feel the energy every
time she touches it's horn. Well, that's that's some great
pr copyright. Now the official story and that Heather the
trainer who could feel the energy h is circus performer
Heather Harris, who you'll see beside the unicorn creature in
lots of press photos and so in. She told a

(34:11):
Pennsylvania newspaper called The Morning Call, and that Lancelot quote
arrived mysteriously. I don't know whether it flew here or
whether it took a train, but it seems to be
very comfortable and at ease here. So it was basically
drawn to the circus like it was lost in this
world and knew that this was the one place it

(34:32):
could find a home. That was their official story, that
it was literally a magic creature who just appeared in Houston, Texas.
But let's say for a second we don't believe Joe
gold story that the unicorn is real magic and just
wandered up to the Wringling Brothers tent in Texas in
the summer of eighty four. What is this thing? Now?
The pretty obvious answer would be that it is a

(34:54):
goat with a fake horn strapped to its head. Right,
it looks like a goat, except it's got a huge
horn in the middle of its head. Uh. You know,
you could probably create that with a strap or some
tape or some glue. And in fact, I've looked up
videos of circus acts featuring quote unicorns more recently, and
they're quite obviously just horses with horns strapped to their heads. Right.

(35:15):
But if they were going to strap a horn to
an animal's head, why didn't they strap a horn to
a horse's head? Why do these animals look like goats
with single horns? Because you can strap a horn to
a horse's head and create a fake unicorn. I've seen one.
They they they at least had one at the Georgia
Renaissance Festival. Yeah, and I took my son to see

(35:36):
it and it was like, is that a unit real unicorn?
I said no, But if it's come on, this is
Ringling Brothers, why wouldn't they go full horse? Yeah? It's
not like they don't have a bunch of animals under
the tent there unicorns. Mysteries abound. Well, let's go forward
in time. So in the spring of a group of
investigators from the s p c A, which is an

(35:57):
animal rights organization, UH, including one veterinarian, went to see
these unicorns at a New York City performance of the
circus to figure out what was going on. And the
circus actually had four unicorns on staff. Lancelot was the
big star with the big horn, but they also had
three other unicorns that were named Galahad, Avalon, and Perceval,

(36:18):
all our Thurian legend names. It's curious because I don't
recall ever encountering a unicorn in Outherian legend. I could
be wrong, because there are a lot of different installments
of Utherian legend. I do not recall unicorns, and I
don't either. They could be in there, but I don't
remember that. But anyway, so the investigators they get there,
they're looking at these unicorns and they're horrified, concluding after

(36:39):
inspection that the animals were quote farm goats with surgically
implanted horns. That's like the worst possible answer, really, it
is but of course the circus still maintained that they
were real magic unicorns who had appeared of their own
accord in Houston, and Wringling Brothers vice president Alan Bloom
said at the time, quote, they are the only unicorns

(37:01):
in the world. They're priceless. They are all males, and
I believe their brothers. We don't know how they reproduce.
I think they're between three and five years old, but
because unicorns are ageless, they may be hundreds of years old.
We just don't know. So this was a real response
to essentially charges of animal cruelty. Yeah, that's what they

(37:23):
They're like maintaining that it's real magic. Uh. And so
to prove the horns were some kind of surgical implant,
John Kolberg, the president of the s p c A
at the time, and other animal rights activists wanted to
have the goats x rayed. Right. They figured, like, Okay,
if this is just an implant, we can x ray
the goat, the goats skull, see that the horn is
not actually attached to the skull, and then you know,

(37:45):
we'll be able to show that they have been cruelly altered.
And the circus initially refused and then in nineteen in April,
Kolberg said he gave them twenty four hours for a
good faith aid to their investigation, but if they didn't
aid in the investigation, they would investigate legal remedies. So
you got this showdown, right. You got the animal rights

(38:07):
people saying, I think you have hurt a goat, and
then you've got the circus people saying, real magic unicorn,
this is such a ridiculous situation to define ourselves in. Well,
then the circus responded and things got more interesting. That
same month, the AP had an article I read reported

(38:28):
on a press conference that Wringling Brothers held on the
unicorn issue, which included an X ray. So they got
two doctors from the University of Pennsylvania to attest to
the animals good health and its state. Dr Charles Reid,
who is a professor of radiology and Dr William Doniwick,
who is a professor of surgery at the University of
Pennsylvania Animal Hospital, and both professors apparently agreed that the

(38:52):
animal was technically a unicorn. Reads radio graphs apparently showed
that the horn was not just implanted on the goat skin,
but was fully attached to the bone and quote, it
is an integral part of the animals skull. So the
horn that was in the middle of the head was
fused to the goat's skull, not just like a thing

(39:12):
surgically sewing onto the skin of the skull. Right, But
how about the unicorn thing, So Dona Wick told reporters, quote,
it's a unicorn. That's what you call an animal with
one horn. A reporter asked, how about a rhinoceros. Don
O Wick said, that's a unicorn too, well and technically

(39:33):
in a way. Yes. Reporter asks, was the unicorn a
goat on the day it was born? Dona Wick says,
I don't know. Reid says, I wasn't there. Now that's
getting into semantics. Yeah, So the circus dudes were, I'm sure,
obviously giddy about this, Alan Bloom, the Ringling Brothers guys,
apparently having reporters feed the animal rose petals during the

(39:56):
press conference. So come on, that's just bribery, right, Get
a goat, even a normal goat, to eat rose petals
out of your hand. You're gonna say whatever they want
you to say. You're going to be overcome by their
their their the charm of their strange eyes. So I'm
not sure exactly how they got these credentialed experts to
play along so well in terms of their framing of
the issue. Right, well, yeah, it's sure it's a unicorn,

(40:16):
but it does at least seem true that the horns
of these goat unicorns were not just something that had
been implanted on the head. But we're actual single horns
attached to the skull. So what happened. Well, here we
get to the truth, and the truth is known to
those who seek it. I think first I should just
give it to you straight. Then we'll back up and
explain the real unicorns of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum

(40:40):
and Bailey circus of the nineteen eighties were created by
a wizard from California, a literal wizard, and not as
in like Mr Wizard, but but as in a man
who is the headmaster of a wizardry academy. This wizard
is known as Oberon Zell Ravenhard born in nineteen forty two,
as Timothy Zell, and sometimes throughout his life just going

(41:02):
simply as Oz Well the one would expect a modern
wizard to go by various names. Yes, there is actually
a really great short documentary about him that came out
within the past couple of years called The Wizard Oz.
That title makes it kind of hard to google, but
the Wizard Oz not the Wizard of Oz, And having
watched it, I can say about this guy, he's one

(41:22):
of those people who you can tell just just committed it,
just said I'm just gonna plunge straight into a life
of profound and unapologetic weardness and just just doesn't really
look back. So a few facts about Oberon Zel Raven Heart,
just to get a flavor of the guy. In the documentary,
Oz talks about how he grew up being fascinated by

(41:43):
Greek myths and pagan stories full of magic, and he
tells of when he was a child he would sometimes
at night run outside naked on nights with full moons,
and he believed that he had telepathic connections with his
pet snake. In around n nineteen sixty two, he co
founded the Church of All Worlds, which is a neopagan religion,

(42:05):
perhaps an example of a hyper real religion. Let me
know what you think, Robert. It was named after a
fictional religion and Robert Heinlein's a stranger in a strange land,
and he has since served in a leadership role or
as quote primate of this religious organization. Uh. In fact,
I believe some of the material that we we looked

(42:26):
at for hyper real religions did reference this, uh, this group. Really. Yeah,
I don't think we spent much time with it, just
because I don't. I don't think you or I had
much grounding. And Robert Heinland's work, Yeah, I'm under read
on Heinlan. Yeah. I read Starship Troopers, and I think
that's the only thing that I have I've read by him. Well.
Oz describes this real version of the religion as a

(42:47):
sort of I think, as a sort of gathering place
for all religious and mythological traditions, sort of without judgment
or views of superiority of any one tradition. And he
actually claims he was the first person to adopt the
terms pagan and neopagan to describe these emerging nature religions
the nineteen sixties. Part of his personal theology is that

(43:10):
all life on Earth is not actually separate, but it
is part of a single unified organism called Gaia or
Mother Earth. You know, I I think Guya theory is
one of our is one of the topics on our
to do list. Yeah, I think it wouldn't be exactly
that proposition, something kind of parallel. More recently, he runs

(43:30):
a wizardry academy with a virtual campus on Second Life
and in the In the past he has done crypto
zoological investigations, including a trip to an island off New
Guinea to track down an alleged string of mermaid sightings
and the creature turned out to be a du gong.
Oh well, that makes it makes sense that it would
the do Gong, of course, being um essentially the the

(43:51):
open sea manity. Yeah. Well, you know all of this
is is weird and wonderful, Joe, but it all sounds
kind of a is given that you led with the
fact that this man created unicorns. So tell me how
did the wizard Oz create unicorns? Well, obviously, as a
person interested in myths and magic, Oz had a healthy

(44:12):
appetite for mythological creatures, including the unicorn. He and his wife,
who was a woman named Morning Glory in the late
nineteen seventies, so they had this fascination with unicorns that
led them in nineteen seventy nine to initiate a project
of creating living unicorns, and they did this after they
read about the research of an American biologist named W.

(44:32):
Franklin Dove. Now W. Franklin Dove was a university of
main biologists who lived from eighteen ninety seven and nineteen
seventy two. And Dove spent a lot of his career
on topics related to agriculture, like animal production, but he
also tackled things like the phenomena of food acceptance and
food rejection, which I think is an interesting thing I've

(44:53):
barely even considered as its own field of science, Like
what causes an animal to eat or to turn down
food offered to it? That is interesting that maybe maybe
something we'll have to return to in a future episode. Yeah.
In his work on animal production, Dove had this hypothesis
about the growth of horns in livestock in animals like
goats and cows. He wanted to prove that instead of

(45:15):
growing directly out of the skull, horns began as buds
in the soft tissue of the skin over the skull
and then only later in development, fused with the skull
to lock in place. So in the nineteen thirties, Dove
demonstrated this by performing surgery on a one day old
male calf, and in this procedure, Dove removed the two

(45:38):
horn buds from their original location of the two sides
of the top of the head and grafted them together
side by side in the center of the calf's head.
And he predicted that if the buds were moved before
they could attach themselves to the skull, the developing calf
would grow horns wherever the buds had been placed, in
this case, in a single unified growth in the middle

(46:01):
of the forehead. And it worked. The calf developed and
grew as a normal, healthy bulb, but with a single
huge horn in the middle of its head, just like
a unicorn. So what we have here is not quite
the like the nightmare scenario of someone surgically implanting a
fake horn onto a goat, but something that is a

(46:21):
little more manipulative. Right. It's the idea of removing a
couple of patches of skin that have primordial cell lines
within them that will tend to develop into horn tissue
as the animal grows up, but grafting them into different
places before they connect and continue their horn growth before,
especially before they fuse to the bone. Okay, so that's

(46:44):
just a form of just a form of body modification
really exactly. And this is the procedure that Oberon Zel
Ravenhart picked up on to create his goat unicorn. So
there's actually a patent in nineteen eighty awarded to one
Timothy Zel, remember that was his birth name, and it's
a patent for a surgical procedure to produce unicorn goats.

(47:05):
Now there, I think there are some highly questionable claims
within the patent. Language like one, so he describes this process,
which clearly worked in creating the single horned goat, but
he also says stuff like quote thereafter the resulting horns
grow as one and connect with the frontal portion of
the skull directly over the pineal gland to render the

(47:26):
unicorn of higher intelligence and physical attributes. Yeah, I'm not
sure about it. Once you start tying the pineal gland
into the whole unicorn horn scenario, begin to have questions. Yeah,
so I think that's that's a little bit overstepping, But
there might be some interesting things to consider about how
it affects mental development. But we'll come back to that
in just a minute. So when Oz and his wife

(47:48):
warning Glory created these unicorn goats. First they toured with them,
appearing at like renaissance fairs and conventions. Robert, you mentioned
you saw a horse at a renaissance fair, a horse
horse with a horn strapped on. Yes, I did see
if a false unicorn. Apparently, if you'd gone to this
fair in the early nineteen eighties you might have seen
a literal one horned goat. But then in the in

(48:09):
the nineteen five period, they first leased them out to
the circus. And a quote from this documentary, Oz says, quote,
everybody has their own creative way of making a living
in the country. A lot of people do arts and
crafts type things. Some people do farming. We raise unicorns.
It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

(48:30):
Somebody has to do it. Yes, Now, of course the
circus at couldn't last forever and Ringling brothers in Barnum
and Bailey leadership, they like to rotate the main attractions
fairly often, so in nineteen eighties seven Felled claimed that
Lancelot had been retired and the circus company moved on
to their next big attraction, which was a huge elephant
named King Tusk. Okay, a little more traditional really for them. Yeah,

(48:54):
so what happened to the goats? What happened to the unicorns? Well,
Oberon and morning Glory stopped creating goat unicorns around teen
ninety and they kept them for a long time. Apparently
the last one passed away in two thousand five. But
that's the story of how we ended up with real
single horned goats. It's apparently a fairly straightforward surgical procedure
that can be done in the first week of the

(49:15):
goat's life and allows them to grow a single horn
like a unicorn horn. And he patented it because he
wanted to create a franchise. I'm not sure why credit
he wanted credit for the procedure. I don't know the
answer there um anyway, Yeah, that would be interesting to know.
But uh so, there was some interesting observations linked to this.

(49:37):
One of them is that there are some reports that
having a single horn actually changed the behavior and personality
of these altered goats and cattle. And that makes me
think kind of all about the like weird personality or
moral traits attributed to the unicorn that would obviously separate
them from other normal four legged beasts. Dove report that

(50:00):
his unicorn bull, Remember this was the guy from the thirties,
Franklin Dove. He reported that his unicorn bull became the
dominant member of the herd and faced very few challenges
from rivals for dominance. At the same time, it seemed
to be of a very calm temperament, and Dove also
reported that the unicorn bull used its horn as a
tool to like lift fences and pass under them, or

(50:22):
as a weapon during fights when it had them. And
that makes me think about the ways in which our
morphology can shape our mentality. In what ways does the
shape of an animal's body and anatomical equipment change what
kind of being you are, down to your very character
and personality, even if it doesn't change the physical structure

(50:43):
of the brain. I mean, it's kind it's a complicated
scenario that he suggests here, because it's it's almost as
if he's he's making a case that the the unicorn
form of the goat is kind of the ideal form,
it's the it's the higher form. And if that were true,
then why isn't it the form of the Why are
not all goats uh single horned animals? Well, that's a

(51:04):
good question. I mean, you might wonder if if it
were actually adaptive, would um I don't know, if you
could somehow select for a gene towards single horned goats.
That seems like a thing. I mean, that wouldn't happen
in this case because it's not a gene for it
as a surgical procedure. But so you know, you had
a goat with a mutation that had just one horn
in the middle of its head like that deer we
talked about. Uh, you know, would that goat actually have

(51:27):
a survival advantage compared to others. I don't see any
reason to think it necessarily would, but maybe who knows, Um,
you gotta wonder it's it. I guess the thing is,
if there was a case to be made that this
is the superior form of the goat, it is a
form that is obtained through body modification, which we can
you know, we could probably make some interesting comparisons to

(51:48):
various human customs of body modification, especially the more established
body modification rituals, but you don't really see much of
that in the animal world. Well, in the same way
much human body modification is cultural. I mean, I wonder
if it would depend on sort of the personality of
the individual, herd or pack. Yeah, what all leads to

(52:08):
the question should we even be trying to make unicorns?
Is it ultimately by making I mean, I think there
is a case to be made that this early modification
to goats it was not necessarily as cruel as like
an adult modification implanting a horn out of nothing would
have been. But at the same time, I don't really

(52:29):
see that there's any reason to do any kind of
unnecessary surgeries on animals. And then on the other hand, uh,
this is not a unicorn in the spirit of the unicorn, Like,
this is a creature that is held captive by a circus. Right,
Maybe unicorn need needs to be a thing that is not,
you know, engineered. It needs to be a thing that
is that is wild and free of human interference. Remember plenty,

(52:52):
it cannot be taken alive, and likewise it cannot be
be made like to to make it, uh in captivity,
to to make it a thing of captivity betrays the
whole idea. I mean, at least if it's a birth defect,
then it is kind of it's an anomaly. It's a
natural anomaly that you may get to witness, but it
is not something that you're just manufacturing and putting a

(53:15):
patent on. Yeah. I agree. While I think the story
is incredibly interesting, I do hope we don't give the
impression that you you should be going out trying to
engineer normal animals to become unicorns. There's no reason to unicorns.
You know, they can stay in the myths, that's right.
And you know, like as you said, feeding a goat
a normal goat, rose petals or any of the vegetable. Uh,

(53:37):
that's going to be pleasant in and of itself. No
need to drag myth into the whole scenario. Alright. So
there you have it. Uh, unicorns of the natural world
as well as unicorns of the mythic world. We have
covered both in this week's episodes. We hope you enjoyed
the ride. Uh. You can check out more episodes of
Stuff to Blow your Mind at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's where we find all the episodes,

(53:58):
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(54:21):
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