The Post-Stab Logistics of Unicorns

Okay, so here's a listener question that sounds like a joke, but I've been thinking about it all morning. Why aren't unicorns real?

Wait, like... biologically? Or historically?

Biologically! I mean, we have giraffes. A horse with a bone sword on its head doesn't seem that crazy compared to a leopard-moose with a twenty-foot neck.

Right, right. Honestly, a unicorn is highly plausible, anatomically speaking. But there's a reason horses didn't evolve them.

Because they didn't need to?

Because it would actively make them worse at being horses.

Wait, really?

Yeah, think about how a horse survives. Its whole evolutionary gimmick is speed. Flight over fight. A horse escapes predators by running really, really fast.

Okay, but—

And to do that, they have these beautifully balanced, streamlined heads. If you slap a three-foot keratin spike on a horse's forehead, you completely ruin its center of gravity.

But wait! What about deer? Or elk? They run fast, and they have literal trees growing out of their skulls.

Okay, fair, but antlers are different. First of all, they shed them—

Still heavy though.

They are, but deer don't use them to impale predators. They use them to wrestle other deer for mates. They lock heads and push. A single, pointy horn in the middle of the forehead is terrible for wrestling. It'd just snap off or get stuck.

Get stuck in what, a tree? Another deer?

A predator! Imagine a horse stabbing a wolf, and now it's got a ninety-pound wolf stuck to its face. It can't run away. It's dead.

Oh my god. I never thought about the post-stab logistics. You'd need, like, little T-rex arms to push the wolf off your horn.

Exactly. The animals that do have single horns, like rhinoceroses—

Right, the chubby unicorns.

The heavy-duty unicorns! They don't run away. They are tanks. If a rhino gets something stuck on its horn, it doesn't care, it just crushes it.

Which, by the way, I read once that the original myth of the unicorn was literally just a bad description of an Indian Rhino.

Yes! Ctesias, a Greek historian. He heard about these one-horned beasts from travelers in India and wrote it down like a game of telephone.

And he said it looked like a horse?

Well, Pliny the Elder later described it as having the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, and the tail of a boar.

That just sounds like a rhino drawn by someone who has only ever seen farm animals.

Pretty much. And then you throw in the Vikings selling narwhal tusks to medieval Europeans, claiming they were unicorn horns...

Oh yeah! Because people didn't know what a narwhal was. Which, by the way, narwhals exist! Why do whales get horns and horses don't?

Because the narwhal tusk isn't a horn, it's a giant tooth. It grows right through their upper lip.

Ugh, nature is so gross.

So majestic.

Alright, so the takeaway here is, if you want a unicorn, you either need a horse with poor aerodynamics or a whale with a lip piercing.

Or just stick with rhinos. They're trying their best.