[In Process Citation]

Analysing all the surviving reports and mentions of the supposed unicorn discovered in the year 1663 near Quedlinburg, this paper replies to the question: "Who reconstructed the skeleton of the unicorn from a find of bones, O. von Guericke or G. W. Leibniz?" and diagnoses that neither of them did so. The author of the first report with a figure was Johannes Meyer, astronomer and treasurer of the Abbes Superior of Quedlinburg; and his German text had been translated by both partly in different ways (Guericke's Experimenta nova, printed in 1672 and used by Leibniz; Leibniz's Protogaea, first printed posthumously in 1749). Discovery, excavation, salvage and reconstruction of the unicorn were ascribed to Guericke only by Othenio Abel (for the first time in 1918 and thereafter on many occasions) without indicating any source for that. His story of the supposed discovery since then has been embellished with a lot of imagination further and further. However, Leibniz himself wrote in his Protogaea, that a figure of the unicorn skeleton (which Guericke does not reproduce) had been sent to him together with a report (by J. Meyer from Quedlinburg); and this figure he and his engraver Nicholas Seeländer 'corrected' and completed in accordance with their own imagination of a unicorn's build in 1716 to illustrate the Protogaea (M. B. Valentini printed a copy of Meyer's original in 1704).