The physicist and mayor of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke (1606-1686) is generally known for having researched the vacuum and invented the air pump, just think of the famous “ Magdeburg hemispheres ”, which are only caused by the vacuum inside the sphere couldn't even be pulled apart by 16 horses.
What is less known, however, is that he also tried his hand at being an archaeologist, and his supposedly greatest discovery is still in the Museum of Natural History in Magdeburg: nothing less than a unicorn!
The unicorn trots through the Internet
Photos of the Guericke unicorn, often called the “Magdeburg unicorn” abroad, are often circulating on social media platforms, including this year:
Okay, the skeleton alone is different from the usual pictures of unicorns. A Twitter user then immediately set about graphically depicting what it might have looked like alive:
— Sats Godzilla (@sats_godzilla) August 14, 2022
A little creepy, right? I think I really need to recreate this unicorn in the game “ Spore ” because it seems to have come straight from there!
The discovery of the unicorn
In 1663, a bizarre skeleton was found during gypsum mining at Seveckenberg near Quedlinburg (Saxony-Anhalt): It consisted of a large skull, several bones and a long horn. The skeleton, which had apparently been broken during recovery, was then handed over to the princess abbess, who had her seat of power in this area.
Five years later, Otto von Guericke allegedly attempted a three-dimensional reconstruction of the skeleton, but nothing is really known about it and it never appeared anywhere: According to descriptions, it consisted of the skull of a herbivore with a long horn on the forehead, around 20 bones, two large shoulder blades and two long legs.
The Giessen doctor and scholar Michael Bernhard Valentini made a drawing in 1714 based on the description of the reconstruction:

The drawing by Gottfried Leibniz
However, the Guericke unicorn only became more widely known after the posthumous book “Protogaea” by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716) was published in 1749. The book, which was an attempt to develop "the germ of a new science called natural geography" (including unicorns), said:
“Since Bartholin demonstrated that unicorns (once one of the most curious and rare gems in natural history cabinets, but now subject to popular admiration) descended from fish from the Arctic Ocean, we may assume that the unicorn fossil found in our landscape has the same origin.
[…]
This skeleton was broken and taken out in pieces due to the ignorance and carelessness of the excavators. But the horn, together with the head and some ribs, as well as the spine and some bones, were brought to the abbess of the place.”
Leibniz reproduced Valentini's drawing and added it to the chapter:

Leibniz wrote in Protogaea that a figure of the unicorn skeleton (which has never surfaced) was sent to him along with a report from Johannes Meyer, astronomer and chamberlain to the chief abbot of Quedlinburg. He and his engraver Nicholas Seeländer are said to have “corrected” and supplemented the skeleton in 1716 to illustrate the “Protogaea” according to their own ideas about the body structure of a unicorn.
Whether the mentioned 3D model or the drawing(s) were there first and whether they first came from Leibniz and were then attributed to Guericke or whether neither of them had anything to do with it is still a scientific debate . In the 1990s, the St. Gallen taxidermist Urs Oberli finally made a plastic reconstruction of the Quedlinburg unicorn.
What the “unicorn” is made of
However, one thing is clear: No, this is of course not a real unicorn, and the skeleton was never surrounded by flesh and was never alive!
Although it has been reported in many media outlets that it is the deformed remains of a woolly rhinoceros, these claims are only half-true, as it is actually a hodgepodge of different fossils haphazardly thrown together.
According to Thijs van Kolfschoten , professor of mammalian paleo- and archaeozoology at Leiden University, the horn is most likely the tusk of a narwhal, the skull is probably the fossil skull of a woolly rhinoceros, the shoulder blades and the bones of the forelegs come from an extinct woolly mammoth (see HERE and HERE ).
Conclusion
All archaeologists (greetings to Pyeah™ ) can breathe a sigh of relief, their profession will not be torn into the depths by the Guericke unicorn, since the reconstructions at the time were not even made by real archaeologists, but belief in unicorns and other mythical creatures was still great back then , so the wild reconstruction was more like wishful thinking, but not based on scientific work.
Article image: Twitter/@BrianRoemmele
Other sources: Wiener Zeitung , Snopes
Also interesting:
An article from an older Federal Law Gazette is intended to prove that identity cards are only issued to stateless people and that they therefore do not provide proof of citizenship.
But a law is not a cake from which you can only cherry-pick... - Identity cards are only issued to stateless people? New Reich citizen nonsense!
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