This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories will discuss a fossil that, at first glance, looks like a meme-worthy accident of science. However, at a second glance, it fits quite comfortably into the world of the revolutionary thinkers that brought us the Enlightenment.
The Quedlinburg unicorn - If you visit the museum of natural history in the German city of Magdeburg, you will find a fossil like no other. You would be excused to think of it as the ossified incarnation of a toddler's drawing. However, it was once taken quite seriously by some of the brightest and sober minds of pre-modern Europe.
The "Quedlinburg unicorn" - museum of natural history, Magdeburg
Our story begins in 1663 near the German town of Quedlinburg where workers in a gypsum mine unearthed a bizarre hotchpotch of bones. Most interestingly, there was a massive skull and a long horn (as well as around 20 other smaller and larger bones). The find attracted the attention of the preeminent Prussian scholar Otto von Guericke (also known as the inventor of the vacuum pump) who apparently attempted a three-dimensional reconstruction of the beast. Unfortunately, only a drawing of his work survived (made by the scholar Michael Valentini in 1714). A copy of the drawing then made its way into the hands of polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz who included a passage about it in his book “Protogaea”*. In it, he stated that the existence of unicorns was proven and added his own drawing of the fossil. However, he also concluded that unicorns were related to "fish from the northern sea" (an astute observation given that the "horn" actually turned out to be the "tusk" of a narwhale).
Drawings of the Guericke-Einhorn after Valentini (left) and after Leibniz (right). Drawings from Gröning and Brauckmann, 2011.
The last of the magicians - The fact that Leibniz, one of the greatest representatives of 17th century rationalism, tried to find a unicorn in a motley assembly of bones seems odd at first. After all, he did more than many to kickstart modern science (e.g., by developing differential and integral calculus, simultaneously with Newton). However, the Quedlinburg unicorn was not just an accident. The people who brought us modernity were both modern and pre-modern - mixing reason and magical thinking.
Isaac Newton famously described the laws of gravity and the physics of moving objects but he also studied the "occult" (Link). He was especially interested in Alchemy, including the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life. He also believed that studying the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza could unlock the timing of the Apocalypse (Link).
In 1942, John Maynard Keynes summarized these seeming contradictions by stating that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians." (Link)
Portrait of Leibniz by Christoph Bernhard Francke, 1695 (left), portrait of Newton by Godfrey Kneller, 1689
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*Chapter 35 of Leibniz’ book “Protogaea"
Sources:
Kolfschoten, M. van, & Hesse, A. (2021). The woolly rhinoceros from Seweckenberge near Quedlinburg (Germany)
Ariew, R (1998). Leibniz on the unicorn and various other curiosities, Earth Science and Medicine 3
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716. (1749). Protogaea, Leipzig; und Hof: Bey Johann Gottlieb Vieling