The Bizarre History of Our Obsession with Unicorns

The oldest description we've found of a unicorn was in 398 BCE, when the Greek Ctesius wrote about an animal from India, which he only knew from reading Persian accounts. Many early references to unicorn-like animals were products of accounts passed along until they were complete nonsense, like the game of telephone. Even the Bible suffered from this confusion, when a unicorn was inserted into places in which an animal unknown to the translators was mentioned. Out of these accounts, a mythology grew up around the nonexistent unicorn. And to this day, we cannot get enough of unicorns. Read more about the history of unicorns, or at least unicorns in myth and literature, at io9.