Qualla: Unicorn Cave

Unicorn Cave: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AxelHH at German Wikipedia, Public domain. You could buy unicorn in early modern Germany. Apothecaries sold it as a powder, ground from fossil bone and prescribed against fever, poison, and whatever else had resisted the other remedies on the shelf. Some of that powder was quarried out of a dolomite hill above Scharzfeld in the West Harz, where villagers dug bones out of the dark and sold them by weight. The cave took its name from the trade and has kept it ever since: Einhornhöhle, the Unicorn Cave. The bones were real. The animal was not.

Read more: Unicorn Cave on Qualla

Image: AxelHH at German Wikipedia | Public domain

Unicorn Cave: The Pharmacy in the Rock

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unicorncave, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cave first appears in the written record in 1541, already known and already being worked. It runs 610 metres through the dolomite of the Zechstein, a karst system dissolved out of stone laid down when a shallow sea evaporated across northern Europe. What made it valuable was ...

Read more: Unicorn Cave on Qualla

Image: Unicorncave | CC BY-SA 4.0

Unicorn Cave: Leibniz Builds an Animal

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, CC0. In 1686 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz came to see the cave for himself and wrote a report noting the local trade in unicorn artefacts. He was not merely a tourist. Otto von Guericke, the mayor of Magdeburg better known for proving the force of a vacuum with two hemispheres and a team...

Read more: Unicorn Cave on Qualla

Image: Chris06 | CC0

Unicorn Cave: Virchow Takes the Horn Away

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unicorncave, CC BY-SA 3.0. The correction came in 1872, when Rudolf Virchow excavated in the cave and identified the bones for what they were. No unicorns. Mammoths, cave bears, and a menagerie of other extinct and vanished animals. Over the years more than 70 species have been recognised in the deposits, ...

Read more: Unicorn Cave on Qualla

Image: Unicorncave | CC BY-SA 3.0

Unicorn Cave: Three Chevrons on a Toe Bone

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Fahrenhorst, CC BY 4.0. Then, in 2019, excavation at the cave's former natural entrance turned up something the seventeenth century would have found far stranger than a unicorn. A toe bone from a giant deer, boiled to soften it and then carved with three stacked chevrons and four short parallel lines, d...

Read more: Unicorn Cave on Qualla

Image: Gerd Fahrenhorst | CC BY 4.0

Unicorn Cave: Walking In

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. An entrance gallery was cut in 1905 to let visitors in, and 270 of the cave's 610 metres are now open as the largest show cave in the West Harz. It serves as one of three information centres for the Harz - Brunswick Land - Eastphalia National Geopark and carries checkpoint 101 on...

Read more: Unicorn Cave on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0