The Stuff of Legend: Italy’s Living "Unicorn"

I was an imaginative kid, the kind who heard "Where is your brain?!" with a frequency that should have alarmed me more than it did. Instead, I kept my head safely in the clouds, dreaming about all the fantastic creatures I wished really lived on earth: elves and dragons, knights and fairies, and of course, the elusive, majestic unicorn.

There's a kid in us that wants to believe. And now, in the Tuscan countryside, there's a reason to.

A young male roe deer with a single horn in the middle of its forehead—check out this photo—has become something of a star. The deer’s resemblance to the mythical unicorn, a fabled one-horned horse depicted in Medieval art and once thought to have magical powers, has captured people’s imaginations: Nearly 200 curious visitors and fantasy fans have flocked to see the deer, aptly nicknamed “Unicorn,” in his 2.5-acre park at Italy’s Natural Sciences Center near Prato, Tuscany, this week.
 
The center’s director, Gilberto Tozzi, described the one-horned marvel in an interview with the Associated Press as “fantasy becoming reality.” Now, it seems, there’s a real-life basis for the whole unicorn myth. Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus is the European species; there’s also a Siberian one) are small, brownish deer native to Europe and Asia. Bucks have two short antlers in front of their ears (photo here).
 
Despite his sudden fame, “Unicorn,” a shy one-year-old, is still going about his daily life at the nature preserve, where he lives with a twin. Given that his brother has two normal horns, it appears Unicorn’s condition—which is especially rare because of the horn’s placement smack in the middle of his forehead—probably isn’t inherited. More likely, it’s just a genetic fluke...or maybe magic. - Alexa Schirtzinger