Scotland's national animal has a horn
The UNICORN has been Scotland's national animal for centuries. It stands on the royal coat of arms wearing a golden chain, and the usual explanation is that a unicorn was thought too wild and proud for anyone but a king to tame.
For a long time plenty of people believed unicorns were real, and you could buy their horns. What merchants were really selling were tusks from the narwhal, a small Arctic whale, and the traders who brought them south had little reason to spoil the story. Powdered 'unicorn horn' was supposed to protect against poison. The kings of Denmark went further and had a throne made of them in the 1660s; it is still on show at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen.
Old bones and a real sea monster
Some monsters may have begun with real evidence, misread. On Mediterranean islands such as Sicily and Crete, people could have come across the skulls of dwarf elephants that died out thousands of years ago. An elephant's skull has one large hole in the middle of the front, where the trunk attached, and it looks remarkably like the head of a giant with a single eye — a popular explanation for the CYCLOPS. The historian Adrienne Mayor has suggested something similar for the GRIFFIN: fossil skeletons of a beaked dinosaur, Protoceratops, lie exposed in the deserts of Central Asia, the very part of the world where Greek writers placed their gold-guarding griffins.
The KRAKEN had the best excuse of all. No squid drags ships under, but the giant squid is real and can grow about as long as a bus. Nobody managed to photograph a living one in the deep sea until 2004.
How to beat a basilisk
The Roman writer Pliny the Elder described the BASILISK as a small snake with a crown-like mark on its head, so poisonous that its breath scorched grass and split rocks. He also gave the cure: a weasel, whose smell was supposed to kill it, even though the weasel died in the fight. Later writers added that it hatched from an egg laid by a rooster, and that a rooster's crow was fatal to it — details Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets borrows.
The name has since passed to a real animal. The basilisk lizard of Central America can sprint across a pond on its back legs, slapping the water fast enough not to sink. Unless you are an insect, it is entirely harmless.
The yeti scalp was a goat
In 1960 Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two people to stand on top of Everest, led an expedition that set out partly to look for the YETI. Monks at Khumjung monastery lent him their prized 'yeti scalp', which was flown to scientists in Europe and America for testing. It turned out to have been shaped from the skin of a serow, a Himalayan goat-antelope. Hillary returned it to the monastery, as promised.
Modern tests have gone further. In 2017 scientists examined DNA from supposed yeti hair, bones and teeth collected across the Himalayas: almost every sample came from local bears, and one came from a dog.