• Question: Could we cross breed horses and bulls (or something) to artificially make unicorns?

    Asked by lisaloo to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I’m sure we could if we got good enough at it. The problem is making one horn – cows normally have two (in fact, the legend of the unicorn perhaps started because Greeks saw Indian coins with cows facing the side, so two horns became one, and the Greeks were convinced that they had one-horned animals!). But sure, rhinos and narwhals have one horn. The problem is that you can’t just breed very different animals as they wouldn’t make a baby. However, if we get better at working with genes directly, we might be able to mix up the genes in an animal embryo so that it does make a unicorn. There’s already a farm that genetically modified goats to make spider silk! So perhaps one day we could engineer a unicorn!

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Hmmmm that’s a good question. Maybe someone from the reproduction zone can pop by and answer this?

      What I do know though is that cross breeding different species of animal produces infertile offspring. So even if we were able to make some unicorns, they would probably not be able to reproduce. Pity 🙁

    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      That wouldn’t be a unicorn, it would be a Borse (not a real animal). To make a unicorn, you’d need a rhino, a horse and a lot of white paint. Which I guess is cheating so I’m not sure how you’d make a unicorn without some serious genetic engineering.

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