When the news of unlikely new creatures — or, better yet, the creatures themselves—arrived in Italy or England or France, they may well have seemed to be dispatches from an allegory. Seeing a strange animal in the flesh, however, also sparked illustrators’ interest in depicting the real. When an elephant, given as a gift from the king of France to the king of England, arrived in London in 1255, historian and monk Matthew Paris created beautifully realistic drawings, evidently from his own observations.
Eventually, realism began to outpace fantasy in depiction of new creatures. Marco Polo returned from his voyages to say that unicorns he had seen were not at all as advertised: “They are not of that description of animals which suffer themselves to be taken by maidens, as our people suppose, but are quite of a contrary nature.”
He was referring to what we now call rhinos.
via www.nautil.us