The news is official and was on the most important and reliable Italian newspapers: a real unicorn lives in Prato, a small Italian town near Florence.

 

No doubts the news is true and it did not surprised me at all. I don't mean I believe in unicorns, dragons and the alike. Oh, well, I do believe in magic, but that magic which is inside us and sometimes let us make wonders....

 

The true is that I strongly believe that every mythological creature and every "weird" event passed on through the centuries has a real background.

 

Let's talk about dragons, for example. Dragons are dinosaurs, are not they? Obviously no human being, even in the deep past, could have seen a dinosaur alive. What can it have happened?

 

In our recent (and trackable) history, at the beginning of 1900 till 2007, some mammoths, perfectly preserved in ice (the "permafrost") have been found in Siberia and are now kept (and some of them exposed) in the zoological museum of St. Petersburg. We know that these giants, together with other animals, became extinct due to a rapid climate change. Can we be really sure that in ancient times no well preserved dinosaur was found somewhere? The last mammoth lived some 40.000 years ago, I think, while the last dinosaur lived about 65 millions ago. Millions! Could a body remain intact for so long? Highly improbable.... Yet it may have happened and the tale of the horrible huge animal may have scared generations of horrified primitive people till the story turned into legend. After all, many past events have been turned into myths....

 

Back to unicorns: these fabulous animals are horse like, pure and with healing powers. In the thousand-year Chinese tradition, unicorns have been also glorified for their wisdom and they are said to have the body of a deer.

 

Well, the unicorn of Prato is a little, cute roe deer. It is some 10 months old and lives in captivity in the park of a natural science institute where few years ago his mother was accepted after being wounded by a car.

 

The little deer was born with a genetic anomaly, one single horn instead of two. What makes him so fascinating is the central position of the horn which really looks like the one of the mythical creature. Single-horned animals are not unusual at all but the horn is usually positioned on one side of the forehead and not so well centered! As the unicorn of legends, is quite shy, probably aware of his uniqueness! Will he be able to fight his contenders as an adult? Or will the single horn which made him so famous only be a disadvantage?

 

Needless to say this deer was named "Unicorn"......

 

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