What is the most magical animal you can think of?  No, not werewolves.  That’s in the monster category.  I’m talking magic, fantasy, the things little girls dream about.  I’m talking unicorns!  The one horned horse has long been associated with magical powers and fantasy landscape.  Some legends maintain that just touching a unicorn will rob it of its magical powers and, as in the Tom Cruise film Legend, change a world of marvel and beauty into one of fear and darkness.

When my daughter was little she loved unicorns and I can remember staying up until three in the morning on one Christmas Eve trying to put together a unicorn castle.  Apparently the instructions required a Unicorn to understand them.  Lots of tabs and fitted pieces and all of it in pink and purple plastic.  Plastic is especially nice for a stressed out, mechanically clueless Irishman to deal with.  One tiny temper burst or one little extra hard push to get a piece to fit and it breaks and all falls apart.  I remember wondering if my daughter would like the Unicorn castle as much if it was mostly wrapped is silver duct tape.  in the end, though, it all came together and proved to be a wonderful toy for at least fifteen minutes on Christmas Day.

But the Unicorns lived on.  I once dated a woman who swore that she actually saw a Unicorn when she was a little girl (I saw werewolves – well, actually not real ones, but pretend ones every time there was a shadow in the trees, but I think that was mostly due to me being stupid enough to go to a werewolf movie when I was about five).  Of course, even though I saw Psycho and other horrifying movies when they first came out during which I would crawl under my mother’s seat in the theater and cover my ears until the screeching was over.  But, while we’re on the subject, do you know what movies caused the most damage to me as a child?  It was Old Yeller, which I happen to know had a similarly devastating effect on several others of my era.  And that was a Disney movie!  I went around my house crying for that studio do for like a week.

But anyway, back to Unicorns.  Now there are scientists who claim that at least some form of Unicorn actually existed — not just in the forest of little girls’ minds which are already populated with Leprechauns, knights in shining armor and Justin Bieber.   According to a study published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences, the unicorn wasn’t a mythical creature, and a skull of the animal recently found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan is shedding new light on how long ago it roamed the Earth. 

The Siberian unicorn is known as the Elasmotherium sibiricum, and scientists believe it died out approximately 29,000 years ago.  This is a great deal later in history that scientists originally thought.  For years it was believed that Elasmotherium sibiricum became extinct about 350,000 years ago.  The important difference this makes is that it is now believed that these creatures may have even crossed paths with humans. According to the Mother Nature Network, humans began spreading across Asia more than 50,000 years ago and could have ended up in Siberia around 35,000 years ago. In fact, actual sight-ings of the animal could be the reason behind the myth of the unicorn. 

Most likely, the south of Western Siberia was a refugium, where this rhino persevered the longest in comparison with the rest of its range,” Andrey Shpanski, one of the researchers that discovered the skull, told Phys.org. “There is another possibility that it could migrate and dwell for a while in the more southern areas.”

Read more: 8 Amazingly Weird-Ass Animals You Never Knew Existed

Although the Siberian unicorn was discovered decades ago, early description of the creature describe the animal as more closely related to the rhinoceros than what we typically imagine unicorns to look like. According to Science Alert, the Siberian unicorn was about 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighed somewhere around 8,000 pounds.

“Our research makes adjustments in the understanding of the environmental conditions in the geologic time in general,” Shpanski told Phys.org. “Understanding of the past allows us to make more accurate predictions about natural processes in the near future — it also concerns climate change.”

And it also fuels the imagination.  The castle I so haphazardly put together that long ago Christmas Even was meant to house toy unicorns of all colors, but mostly white, sky blue and pink.  Some of them even had rainbow colored tails.  I bet that Elasmotherium sibiricum didn’t have that!

___