First Creature post;

Meet the Shadhavar!

The Shadhavar (or Unicorn), is a rare desert dwelling equine, which lives in the hard to reach, sandstorm covered parts of the southern lands. It is a solitary creature, that only meets up to mate and raise it's young during the rainy seasons; often seen as the perfect match for warriors of all cultures and creeds.

Meet the world's most unusual monsters in this darkly funny collection of creatures and cryptids from folkloric history. Illustrator Emma SanCartier captures the bizarre and hilarious elements of 17 monsters from around the world in a light, tongue-in-cheek tone, from the Japanese dream-eater Baku and the Persian carnivorous unicorn Shadhavar to the Eastern-European Shurale, a literal tickle monster. Packaged in a textured three-piece case and illustrated in lush watercolor, Monsters You Should Know is a perfect primer for the many strange, frightening, and compelling things that go bump in the night

Image is of a karkadann, a turkish unicorn, artist unknown.

The Shadhavar is a type of unicorn from Persian mythology. It is known by many other names, including Sadhuzag, Shādawār and Âras. It is said to combine the features of a deer, a bull and a goat.

Its most notable feature is its large horn, which has forty-two hollow branches on it. When the wind blows through these branches, they play a pleasant note. Shadhavar horns were sometimes harvested and presented as gifts to kings, who would play them like flutes.

Image source.

Monster master list.

Though at cursory glance this strange animal may appear similar to the unicorn, look closely; the strange, lumpy “horn” is covered in skin, and is in fact not a horn at all! Meet the shadhavar, cousin to the wildebeest and mammalia’s answer to hadrasaurine crests. While it is not literally riddled with holes through which the wind blows freely, the shadhavar’s strange crest is adorned with tubercles which are thought to be associated with sexual display. Males have significantly larger crests than females and up to 72 tubercles, though the average in breeding males is around 42. The crest itself is hollow, and in a case of remarkable convergent evolution to parasaurolophus, allows the amplification of sound to dramatic effect. Some say it’s calls are hauntingly beautiful, others might argue it sounds like a walking vuvuzela; for members of its own kind, the cries carry a variety of meanings from danger to coordination to love. The crest is said to have been gifted to kings, who would hold it at specific angles in a breeze so as to produce unique sounds.

 Shadhavar travel in small, loose herds of females and young led by a single male while non-competitive males travel in bachelor groups. A herd may be spread over great distances, as long as they can still hear their neighbors’ low frequency “safety” calls. Though they have always been uncommon, their range has shrunk since the last ice age from much of west Asia to limited ranges in the Anatolian plateau in Turkey. The shadhavar first appeared in the mid Pleistocene, sharing a common ancestor with the now extinct rusingoryx, another alcelaphine bovid with a weird hollow skull.

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