They found the unicorn! Well, sort of...

09/16/2009

A roe deer in Italy was born with a single, centrally placed horn. The legendary unicorn? AP Photo/Young Kwak

The mystical, mythical unicorn has finally been found! Well, sort of. But perhaps we have found a new possibility for the animal that may have inspired many legends.

A roe deer born at the tiny 2.5-acre Natural Sciences Center of Prato sanctuary in Italy's Tuscan region has a single unicorn-like horn protruding from the center of its skull. Its twin, however, has two normal horns. The animal is now a year old, and over 200 people have flocked to see the deer, who sanctuary director Gilberto Tozzi named “Unicorn.”

Most likely a genetic anomaly caused the single horn and its central location, but another possibility is that the deer had an injury early in life. Other deer sometimes grow a single horn, but usually on one or the other side. The central position of Unicorn’s horn is an oddity. But if it happened with one animal, it can certainly happen with others. Who knows, maybe there’s even an extinct species that had a single horn that hasn’t yet been discovered. At least one mammal has the genes in place to consistently grow a single horn: the narwhal, a toothed whale with a single long spiraling tusk, resembles a unicorn of the sea. Regardless, this true case of a single-horned deer suggests it’s possible that a deer born with a uni-horn inspired legendary stories of the unicorn.

Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) live in Europe and Asia Minor and are abundant. As far as deer go, they’re fairly small - reaching 30 to 60 pounds or so - and their horns also don’t grow very long. For the first two years of life, the young deer grow non-branched horns, but older males get larger racks, growing 8-10 inches long and with two or three, and rarely four “points” or branches.

Here’s an interesting fact – the original Bambi in the book Bambi, A Life in the Woods, was a roe deer and the book set in Europe, but it was changed to a white-tailed deer when the book was adapted by Walt Disney as an animated feature.