Unicorn of the Day

These six tapestries were woven in Flanders around 1500, but lay forgotten and rotting in a damp French castle until a novelist named Prosper Mérimée stumbled upon them in 1841.

Something in the Forbidden Forest is killing unicorns and drinking their blood straight from the wound — that mystery is exactly what sends Harry into the forest at night to begin with.

In "Unicorn Store," a failed artist named Kit gets a strange, glittery invitation to a shop that claims it can sell her a real, live unicorn — if she can prove she's ready to take care of one.

In the 1480s, King James III put a unicorn on Scotland's money — a gold coin literally called "the unicorn," showing a crowned unicorn holding up the royal shield, and it was prized enough that Scottish kings handed it out as gifts to foreign dignitaries.

The unicorn food craze was started entirely by accident — in June 2016, food blogger Adeline Waugh was just experimenting with cream cheese and natural pigments on toast, and her followers dubbed the colorful result "unicorn toast," kicking off a global fad.

Tucked into the Talmud is the tahash, a real scriptural unicorn — rabbis in the tractate Shabbat describe it as a single-horned animal whose hide covered the biblical Tabernacle.

"Unicorn Wars," released in 2022, follows two bear-cub brothers drafted into an army whose mission is wiping out the unicorns living deep in the forest — director Alberto Vázquez built the whole film as a dark parable about war and religious fanaticism.

Peter S. Beagle wrote The Last Unicorn back in 1968, in his mid-twenties — the book responsible for more of pop culture's mental image of a unicorn than just about anything else in print.

In 1983, Robert Vavra published Unicorns I Have Known — full of gorgeous photographs of unicorns that were, in reality, horses dressed up with a single ornamental horn fixed to the bridle.

The haetae is Korea's version of the unicorn — a lion-bodied, scale-covered creature with a single horn on its forehead — and Koreans once believed it could sense a coming fire and warn a household in time.

The Baroque painter Domenichino completed "A Virgin with a Unicorn" around 1604 to 1605, painting it straight onto a wall of Rome's Palazzo Farnese as part of the building's grand gallery ceiling.

Aristotle only ever named two truly single-horned animals in all his writing — the Indian wild ass, and the oryx — and Pliny the Elder later ran with it, treating the oryx as a real-life prototype for the unicorn.

Ambroise Paré, royal surgeon to four French kings, wrote in 1579 that the unicorn was 'something more imagined than real' — a startling thing for the era's most trusted surgeon to say out loud.

The luduan is a Chinese unicorn — in one common description, a green-coated, deer-like creature with a single horn and a horse's tail — said to understand every language in the world.

The lion and unicorn on the UK's royal coat of arms represent England and Scotland respectively — a pairing that dates back to 1603, when Scotland's King James VI also became King James I of England and combined the two crowns.

In "Robot Unicorn Attack," you play a chrome robot unicorn galloping and leaping across a candy-colored sky, dodging obstacles and chasing stars — Adult Swim Games released it in 2010, and it logged a million plays in its first week.

Scotland once had an actual gold coin called 'the unicorn' — first struck under King James III in 1484, worth eighteen shillings, and stamped with a crowned unicorn holding up the royal shield.

Writer Harutoshi Fukui named his 2007 Gundam novel series "Unicorn" on purpose — it doubled as a nod to the story's Universal Century setting, abbreviated "UC," and to the old mythical symbol of a single-horned creature.

The Indian rhinoceros carries the unicorn's own name in its scientific title — Carl Linnaeus christened it Rhinoceros unicornis back in 1758, Latin for "one-horned," making the unicorn official taxonomy.

In Hindu tradition, the god Vishnu's first avatar was a giant fish named Matsya — and this unicorn of a fish grew a single horn on its head specifically so a rope could be tied around it.

The qilin, often called the "Chinese unicorn" for the single horn on its deer-like body, is a legendary creature said to appear whenever a great sage or ruler is about to be born or die — making it basically a cosmic VIP announcer.

The Javan rhinoceros carries a single horn on its nose — rarely longer than 25 centimeters, but a genuine one-horned animal, which is exactly the shape naturalists have long pointed to as a real-world source for unicorn legends.

Osamu Tezuka — the same artist who created Astro Boy — sketched a tiny, nameless unicorn during a trip to Los Angeles in June 1976, and named him Unico on the flight home to Japan.

For centuries, European sailors and scholars didn't call the narwhal a whale at all — they called it the "unicorn of the sea," and its long spiraling tusk became the template artists used whenever they painted a unicorn's horn.

C.S. Lewis published "The Last Battle," the final book in his Chronicles of Narnia series, on September 4, 1956 — and gave one of its central roles to Jewel, a unicorn who is King Tirian's closest companion.

The Unicorn Frappuccino debuted at Starbucks in April 2017, made with mango-flavored syrup, pink and blue sour powders, ice, milk, and whipped cream — a drink as colorful as its name suggests.

Blade Runner is set in a "futuristic" Los Angeles — in 2019, a year that has already come and gone, meaning the dystopian future the film warned about is now officially in our past.

The Unicorn Theatre started in 1949 as a mobile theatre, literally driving around British towns and villages to bring live theatre to people who might never otherwise see a show.

Legend was directed by Ridley Scott and stars a young Tom Cruise alongside Tim Curry, who plays the Lord of Darkness — a role that became one of cinema's most iconic villain performances.

One Ocyrhoe was the daughter of the famous centaur Chiron, and she had the gift of prophecy — but it got her into serious trouble when she revealed her father's exact fate, resulting in her losing the power of speech and being transformed into a horse.

Al-Mi'raj is a mythical creature from medieval Arabic literature that looks like a yellow hare or rabbit with a single black horn — basically a unicorn bunny.

The yale is a mythical beast resembling an antelope or goat, but with the tusks of a boar and enormous horns that can swivel in any direction — making it a nightmare to fight no matter which way you try to attack.

Tianma, meaning "heavenly horse," is a winged flying horse from Chinese folklore — sometimes depicted with dragon scales to really drive home the fantasy factor.