Fossil Confirms Unicorns Were Real (Sort Of)

If you've ever had people tell you unicorns don't exist, you can point them to this new study and let them know they're wrong. Sort of. New research from Russia's Tomsk State University, published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences, explains that scientists have located a fossilised skull from the so-called "Siberian unicorn." The Elasmotherium sibiricum remains, along with fossils from other mammals, were found in Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region. Before you get too excited, though, you should know that the animal looked more like a rhinoceros than the traditional, horse-like unicorn you might be picturing. The so-called unicorn was about 6 feet tall, roughly 15 feet long, and weighed almost 9,000 pounds — which makes it biologically closer to the size of a woolly mammoth than to the size of a horse, ScienceAlert explains. Aside from the fact that the creature had one horn, there's another reason the fossils are so fascinating for scientists. The skull proves that the Elasmotherium sibiricum was active on Earth just 29,000 years ago. Before these findings, experts believed the creature became extinct 350,000 years ago. Scientists are now studying how, exactly, the "unicorn" species was able to live for so long, science, research, and technology website, Phys.org reports.