-
Random Facts
- What Bird Eats with Its Head Upside Down?
- When Is California Not in the United States?
- How does the midocean ridge grow?
- How Does Soap Get You Clean?
- How many different kinds of fossils are there?
- How Did the Sandwich Get Its Name?
- What Makes a Mexican Jumping Bean Jump?
- What Civil War General Wrote The Book Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ?
- Why Does The Jackal Stay Home Even As It Gets Older?
- Why Was King Louis Philippe Of France Thrown Out of an American Hotel?
-
Recent Comments
- yazeed on Can We Build Cities on the Moon?
- Sudheer on How Much Does the Earth Weigh?
- Asha on Who invented Money and why?
- Dr. Nancy Malik on Is there a difference between homeopathy and holistic medicine?
- loliipop on Who Invented Chewing Gum?
- Amy on When Did Books First Appear?
- Kayla on When was the first open-heart surgery performed and by whom?
- emh2010 on How Do Whirlpools Begin?
- CokeWaveDante on Where Is the World’s Largest Roller Coaster?
- saba on How Are Rocks Formed?
-
Tags
-
-
Pages
Why Was The Narwhal Whale Thought To Be A Unicorn?
The narwhal is a toothed whale that lives year-round in the Arctic. The narwhal is the rarest of all species of whale, and scientists know very little about them.
They do know that there are about 20,000 to 30,000 of them and that they cruise the waters of the Arctic Ocean far from shipping lanes and the hunting grounds of whaling ships. Males have a huge left tooth that grows throughout their life.
At some point in the whale’s youth, this tooth pierces the upper lip and keeps growing beautifully straight and tapered but twisted in a perfect spiral. Nobody has the slightest idea what the narwhal males use this great tooth for.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the narwhal was thought to be a unicorn, and its tooth was worth its weight in gold. At that time, whalers hunted the Arctic for the whale and killed every one they could find.
One of the greatest appeals of the “unicorn horn” was that it was supposed to protect its owner from poisons.
According to Inuit legend, the narwhal’s tusk was created when a woman with a harpoon rope tied around her waist was dragged into the ocean after the harpoon had pierced a large narwhal. She turned into a narwhal herself, and her hair twisted around in the water until it became the narwhal tusk.