A Myth Is Born

The myth of the unicorn may have come from sightings of antelope and such
ungulates with only one horn, having either been born with the defect or lost the horn
when scrapping with a predator or one of its own kind. Less likely still is seeing a
normal antelope from afar in profile, since that would only last as long as the animal
didn’t move.
A far more likely culprit is the Indian rhinoceros, and clues for this are sprinkled
throughout the early accounts—indeed, the unicorn is sometimes referred to as the
Indian ass. Pliny, for instance, mentions that the unicorn has “the feet of an elephant,”
a rhino’s feet in fact being not hooved like a horse’s, but fleshy like an elephant’s. He
also notes that it has “the tail of a boar,” much like a rhino’s, “and a single black horn
three feet long in the middle of its forehead.” Writers would only later describe the
horn as white.
The ancient Greeks and Romans, you see, had been making forays into India and
bringing back tales of the strange beasts there, and the facts tended to get a bit...lost.
Cotton, for instance, was said to grow in India as an actual lamb that sprouted from
the ground, just hanging there patiently producing cotton. And while Pliny actually
did a pretty good job of describing the rhino, his popularization of the “unicorn”
picked up more and more improbabilities as the centuries wore on. We also know that
the ancient Chinese had contact with rhinos from art made out of their horns, so the
animal could well have also inspired the kirin.

Today, the unicorn is a decidedly more magical, gentle creature, running around on
rainbows and inspiring millions with regular appearances in  My Little Pony and the
occasional acid trip and in North Korea, apparently. I'd recommend against heading
over to Pyongyang to find one, though. Maybe just stick to the acid.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/fantastically-wrong-unicorn/