Quote (kaisersigismund @ Jan 15 2022 05:45am)
I do have a book from the 1600s iirc called voyages and travels.
There is a chapter that tells of 2 spanish castaways in Florida( they call the native people floridans), who speak of a unicorn and it has 1 horn and drinks the water at the river etx, the same beast of which many frenchmen had brought their horns home.
They also speak of mexico so I assumed they were in america.
I can dig up the book if you want to see for yourself.
A rhinocerous usually has 2 horns not 1 and looks nothing like a horse. Is my rebuttal to the academia answer.
There is the Narwhal whale which has 1 horn so why not a horse?
Also in the 1912 americana mentions unicorn and the paragraph needs deciphering lol.
I mean, from what I understand about fossilization specific to dinosaurs, their horns were made of bone and not keratin which would allow the horn to be represented during discovery due to the calcium in the bone. According to a couple google searches keratin does not fossilize, however; much like the skull of the white tail dear for example the protrusion of the skull where the keratin horns form is the indicator for a keratin horned animal so, we should be able to see whether it has horns or not. But then again, fossilization by definition requires 10,000 years so, we may yet discover it in undisturbed sediment. In that excerpt from Voyages and Travels you posted, they were given horns of these horned horses, and using that as a context clue in conjunction with the issues we still face even today with horned creatures and poaching, they could've been hunted to extinction. The problem is 10,000 years from year 1600 is year 11,600 and the years it existing before that, which are unknown. Kind of funny to think we know far more about dinosaurs from their fossil records than basically any animal that went extinct before humans started record keeping. Anyways, I found a unicorn
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/29/siberian-unicorn-extinct-humans-fossil-kazakhstan. Given that thing is 29,000 years old it's likely far more horse species followed this evolutionary process.
This post was edited by crunkinator on Feb 1 2022 11:51am