Fun fact, The Questing Beast of Arthurian Legend is the result of people attempting to describe what a giraffe was, then being explained and drawn by people who have never actually seen it.
The Questing Beast was said to have a head and neck of a snake (long neck), body of leopard (coat pattern), hind legs of a lion (tufted tail) and feet of a deer (”hooves:).
I’m having emotions at this artwork. It’s caught between fright and awe; fascination and fear.
Behold, a unicorn.
He got two horns tho
*record scratch*
*music starts back up*
BEHOLD, A UNICORN
Well, maybe. If unicorns were inspired by rhinos, it would have been the Indian rhino, since the unicorn myth originated in India. But it tends to have short, stubby horns due to wear, and as you may notice the horn is on the nose, not the forehead.
There’s now three other accepted theories- aurochs, gazelles/antelopes, and the Asian kirin/qilin. The auroch was a large cow that is the ancestor of modern domestic cattle. It has large horns and went extinct in the 1600s. This is the likely source of the biblical “re’em”, a muscular, stout beast with a single horn that is now often misinterpreted as a unicorn. If and aurochs or a gazelle or antelope was viewed from the side for a fleeting moment, the viewer could easily mistake it for having a single horn. And the kirin is a mythical beast in many East Asian folklores that is essentially a horned dragon horse. Tales of it would have trickled their way to Europe along trade routes. Even today it’s often associated with unicorns, hence the Kirin in Monster Hunter.
It is, of course, quite likely that all four things, rhinos, aurochs, gazelles, and stories about kirins, melded together to result in the unicorn. In fact in late dark ages/early medieval times unicorns could even be described as a sort of wild donkey, deer, or goat. It eventually would change to being a horse. So the myth has evolved quite a lot, suggesting much outside influence over millennia.
Also, in Ming dynasty China, the kirin was associated with giraffes.