The unicorn began, in part, as a misreading. The Hebrew re'em, a wild ox, became monoceros in the Septuagint, and the King James Bible inherited the word. For centuries afterwards, illuminators, surgeons, apothecaries, and sovereigns accepted the existence and power of the single-horned beast. It was hunted in tapestries, catalogued in pharmacopoeias, and accounted, in the ledgers of courts, as an expense towards its horn.

Once, the unicorn was found. Marco Polo, in Sumatra, described it faithfully: buffalo's hair, elephant's feet, a preference for mud — nothing, he conceded, like the beast of the stories. He had seen a rhinoceros. He did not announce a new animal; he corrected an old one. The unicorn was not disproved. It was found defective and survived because no specimen was ever adequate to it. 

Images do not attest to the existence of things. They propose them. 

This series goes looking for what the record already contains.