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Capital One Bank Guy (0:00)
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Aaron Manke (0:34)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The past is a foreign country author L.P. hartley coined this phrase in 1953 in the opening lines of his book the Go between, an instantly iconic simile, it describes how alien even our own history looks to ourselves. With enough time, history just becomes archaeology. But if human history is a foreign country, natural history is like another planet. Cleopatra lived closer in history to the invention of the iPhone than the construction of the great pyramids. Your lifespan is closer to your great great grandparents than a Tyrannosaurus rex was to a Stegosaurus. And after the passage of so much time, it requires an immense act of imagination to fill the gaps left by time. When you enter a natural history museum, for example, one of the first sights you're likely to see is a fully assembled dinosaur skeleton. They're impressive, eye catching, and give a sense of immediacy and scale to the past that might otherwise elude us. We can easily imagine what it would be like to be in that thing's presence, even if our species never overlapped. But what we don't often think about is all the trial and error that it took to assemble the skeleton properly. Some skeletons are found intact, but others require mixing and matching with bones from other sites or replicas made to replace missing or damaged fossils. And if multiple fossils are found in the same place, the possibility for mixing creatures up becomes very present. And one of my favorite examples of this happening took place in central Germany. Sometime in the 17th century, workmen who were mining near the town of Magdeburg unearthed a strange cave. In this cave they found strange bones, bones that looked nothing like any animal they had ever seen. Word quickly spread throughout the town, and eventually the mayor, Otto von Guericke, studied the bones himself. Guericke was initially quite worried that the workmen had damaged the bones by handling them improperly. But his worries were soon eclipsed by his own excitement at the discovery. He wrote an article about this amazing find in the local newspaper, and shortly thereafter, they set about reconstructing this strange, strange beast. We have to remember that the field of paleontology just didn't exist back then. There was no ruling authority for Gurka to report to for this kind of esoteric discovery. So instead, Guricka brought the bones to the town's abbess, who helped lead a reconstruction of the creature. As they tested which bones fit with which, they were met with another miraculous revelation. This creature had a long horn protruding from its skull, sharp as a knight's lance. And for many years, local legend had contended that there were unicorns in these lands. In fact, there was a small cottage industry among the villagers that involved selling medicine made out of unicorn bones. But this was the first full skeleton assembled of such a creature. It would become a prized possession of the town, famed in local legend. Later in the 17th century, a German polymath named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz drew a version of the creature skeleton, using Guricke's description as his primary basis. The resulting depiction of the so called Magdeburg unicorn looked strange. A strong jawed skull with two massive forelegs, framing ribs and a spinal column that tapered off with a tail. The bipedal creature didn't really look like a horse, like one assumes in most unicorn legends, but more like a narwhal with an enormous head and two overdeveloped front legs. Although the bones themselves would be lost over the centuries, the creature passed into legend thanks to the drawings that Leibniz made. Of course, it would become obvious that Gurica, the abbess and the people of Magdeburg had not discovered a unicorn. They'd made a haphazard assembly of different prehistoric animal fossils. The so called unicorn is mostly made up of fossilized woolly rhinoceros, a creature whose existence was not known at the time. To the modern eye, it looks downright outrageous. A goofy bipedal creature with proportions out of a cartoon. And while we don't know for certain how seriously this discovery was taken by the scientific community of its era, we do know that the Magdeburg unicorn has a special place in the annals of science. It's gone down in history as the worst fossil reconstruction of all time.