"Magdeburg Unicorn" (OMG I can't stop laughing)

[Nevilledog]

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Brian Roemmele
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Aug 14, 2022
@BrianRoemmele
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In 1663, the partial fossilised skeleton of a woolly rhinoceros was discovered in Germany. This is the “Magdeburg Unicorn”, one of the worst fossil reconstructions in human history.
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Joseph Mallozzi
@BaronDestructo
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This 350-Year-Old Reconstruction Of A "Unicorn" Skeleton Is Totally Hilarious
iflscience.com
This 350-Year-Old Reconstruction Of A "Unicorn" Skeleton Is Totally Hilarious
8:31 AM · Aug 14, 2022

https://www.iflscience.com/this-350yearold-reconstruction-of-a-unicorn-skeleton-is-totally-hilarious-51122

Throughout the rocky history of science, there have been more than a fair share of blunders, embarrassments, and shameful screw ups. However, few come more hilarious than the valiant efforts of natural history in 17th-century Germany and its unwavering belief in the humble unicorn.

If you pay a visit to the Natural History Museum Magdeburg, you’ll undoubtedly notice a strange “unicorn” specimen. Of course, the skeleton was not actually a mythical beast. It was, in fact, a woolly rhinoceros, an extinct species that roamed throughout much of Eurasia until the end of the last Ice Age.

Sure, this spineless species might just look like a secondhand Lego model put together without an instruction manual, but these strange bones managed to fool some of the brightest brains of 17th-century Germany.

The bones were first found in a cave near the mountain town of Quedlinburg in 1663. The sensational discovery caught the attention of Otto von Geuricke, the Prussian scientist who invented the vacuum pump, who concluded that the incomplete skeleton was, indeed, a unicorn.

*snip*

[70sEraVet]

1. Thank you Nevilledog. It is worth a good laugh.

But I wonder how many of OUR scientific assumptions will be mocked in the future? Particularly our assumptions about the intelligence of our earlier hominid ancestors.

[Nevilledog]

2. Well, if they're this far off I'd say they were justified.

[central scrutinizer]

3. Science made stupid

https://www.besse.at/sms/evolutn.html

[2naSalit]

4. So...

Where were the organs supposed to go? No surprise it went extinct.

No wonder it's mythical, it's certainly impossible.

[Nevilledog]

6. It's a unicorn, 2naSalit. They run on pixie dust.

[2naSalit]

8. Oops...

I forgot that part.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. The weird thing is that it doesn't look like any drawing of a unicorn

let alone a woolly rhinoceros. This says the drawing of the 'tripod unicorn' skeleton first appeared in 1704: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4130113

[KY_EnviroGuy]

7. Good replacement for Republican's elephant mascot?

Let's check it out...

Small brain: Check.

Big mouth: Check.

Hard head: Check.

Really bad disposition: Check.

Rigid, threatening demeanor: Check.

Gutless: Check.

Looks like a prick: Check.

Based on false belief system: Check.

Spineless: FAIL.

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Oh, well.........

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[Retrograde]

9. Cut them some slack

they were just thinking about getting around to maybe inventing paleontology at the time - science progresses because of recognized mistakes

This reconstruction reminds me of one of my favorite pre-modern scholars, Anthasius Kircher, who dabbled in all areas of science and was wrong in most of them. He had some, um, unique ideas, such as Noah didn't have to take giraffes on his ark because he could breed them up later from leopards and camels, or reindeer because ordinary deer would somehow evolve into them as they moved north. He thought Egyptian hieroglyphs were related to Chinese writing. But he was willing to lower himself into the crater of Vesuvius to see how volcanoes worked, and was stumbling in the general direction of discovering germ theory.