You are mistaking the word in your own quote “some” with your notion of “all scientists”. And what was the eventual outcome? That they investigated, using science, and concluded that it wasn’t a hoax. So, science worked. Why is that so hard for YOU to grasp, could it be, oh I don’t know your “heavy bias toward a myth that scientists are biased.”
Meh, this is a pretty routine experience in our current technological era: certainly for machines/devices, albeit not for living critters.
Things that have “come out of the realm of fiction and enter[ed] the real world” in the past couple hundred years include functional equivalents of flying carpets, flying chariots, crystal balls (at least for communication/surveillance purposes, if not for predicting the future), giants that can uproot trees and move buildings, genies that can spin and weave massive amounts of fiber in unbelievably short times with unbelievably complex patterns, magic wands that can measure and calculate quantities in the blink of an eye, doors that open unbidden as you approach them, etc., etc., etc.
Fairytale magic turning out to be for all practical purposes part of the real world is something that we as humans easily get used to.
Yes, but it wasn’t like there was a legend of the platypus, and when we found the platypus we decided that the legends were true after all.
In fact, the unicorn was a real thing.
The creature described by Pliny really existed, but we don’t call it a “unicorn”, we call it a “rhinoceros”.
The fantasy creature that looks like a white horse-deer with a slender spiral horn is the result of a thousand years of memetic mutation, the spiral horn is a narwhal tooth stuck on a horse-deer’s body.
I mean, an elephant is a real creature. And in medieval times the elephant was referenced, even though nobody in Europe had ever seen a real elephant. So they drew it like this:
Thing is, we can see how those creatures are distorted elephants, the tusks, the nose, and so on. But that creature isn’t very much like a real elephant, is it? Now suppose elephants had went extinct in 18 AD, and the medieval legends of elephants still existed. And then in 2018 a scientist finally found a real elephant skeleton.
What would the reaction be? Oh my god, the elephant was real? Or would it be more like “Hey, this creature was probably the inspiration for the medieval legend of the so-called elephant”? But it wouldn’t resemble the medieval legendary elephant very much, would it?
So…if the unicorn really existed, how closely do you expect the real unicorn to resemble medieval depictions of the unicorn? The real unicorn would probably resemble this famous depiction: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries) | French (cartoon)/South Netherlandish (woven) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art about as much as the real elephant resembles the sad pig-dogs of medieval art.
The thing is, a sad pig-dog creature could really have existed. So finding a skeleton that looked like the medieval imagination of an elephant wouldn’t be impossible. In fact there are fossils of creatures that looked a lot like that, the Pyrotherium from South America.
Except the Pyrothere didn’t inspire the medieval legendary elephant, despite looking more like the legendary elephant than the real elephant does. The real elephant inspired the legendary elephant.
So if we imagine there was a “real” dragon, a “real” bigfoot, a “real” unicorn, and a “real” centaur, what exactly does that mean? The skeletons are exactly like the pictures over on Deviant Art? But how could that be, when the Deviant Art pictures aren’t all the same? The modern depictions over on Deviant Art of these legendary beings aren’t going to be accurate, because that would be impossible, because nobody who draws one over there has ever seen one.
So we already have the real inspiration for the unicorn. It looks like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/One_horn_Rhino_in_Kaziranga_national_park.jpg/1200px-One_horn_Rhino_in_Kaziranga_national_park.jpg
The real unicorn existed. It doesn’t look like the depictions of unicorns over on Deviant Art, and neither would the real dragon, the real bigfoot, or the real centaur.
I could accept the idea that biotechnology might advance to the point that we can build dragons or unicorns. But discovering that they came into existence without us creating them would be different.
I’d be pretty sure it was a hoax. The “giant” alone would be enough for me. Square-cube law and all that. Heck, an 8 ft human has so many structural problems that most poor sods die fairly quickly.
Sure, especially as the Unicorn was based upon reports of the Rhino.
But yeah, there have been one-horned goats. A horned horse-like critter is not impossible.
Centaurs- no way.
Dragons? Well, not every mythological dragon breathed fire or flew. Early images of St George’s “dragon” show a animal (which does have wings) about the size of a very large dog. No reason such a creature couldn’t exist. A Komodo dragon-like lizard with vestigial wings? Sure.
Gigantopithecus stood maybe 3 meters tall. Bigger than that runs into issues. But there’s no reason a hominid of sorts couldn’t be that big.
I’m staying out of this conversation. 
Yes: “It has the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead.” we tend to forget that “feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar” part, which does make it much more rhino!
You’re impossible!
And also note.
The unicorn appears in the Bible. So the unicorn must really exist?
No, because “unicorn” is just how the guys who created the King James Version translated the Hebrew word “רֶאֵם”.
But what exactly is this re’em? Was it a white horse-deer with a spiral horn?
No, it probably meant a wild ox. Or maybe a rhinoceros. Nobody knows for sure, but in the Bible the re’em is depicted a wild strong creature with horns or a horn. It is a creature comparable to the Behemoth and the Leviathan. That is, a terrible wild creature vastly more powerful than any mere human, but firmly under God’s power.
Or take the qilin, the so-called chinese unicorn. And here’s a famous picture of one: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/BcnZTiwKmxYXlwLycAX87B1f83c=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/ab/7a/ab7a9202-f69f-45fe-a17e-0354db249e33/giraffe.jpg
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/ab/7a/ab7a9202-f69f-45fe-a17e-0354db249e33/giraffe.jpg){kind=link}
And that creature is obviously a giraffe, drawn by somebody who has seen a giraffe. They brought back a giraffe from Africa to China, and decided it was a qilin. So does that mean that the mythological qilin was real all along?
Or does it just mean that they applied the name of a mythological creature to a real creature? And/or vice versa?
And in medieval Europe there was a rumor that in India there were vegetable sheep. Sheep that grew out of a plant, and the Indians could harvest wool from them. But of course the were really talking about cotton. So the idea was there–a plant that produce valuable fiber similar to wool. But the details were all wrong.
And this is why I would have to fight the hypothetical. How could the amateur artists over on Deviant Art get every detail correct of the real-life dragon, bigfoot, unicorn or centaur when they’ve never seen an actual example of one? How could that work?
It couldn’t be that these creatures actually existed in real life, and our modern legends of them were based on the actual creatures, because that’s not how legends work, as we’ve seen by the legendary elephant. Alien Space Bats who do genetic engineering and time travel for kicks are a much more logical explanation.
Lemur866
I agree with your central point, but IMHO that medieval drawing looks more like an elephant than a pyrotherium. Sure the neck is too long and the ears are too small, but look at the shape an placement of the eye, the curve of the lower lip, the shape of the head, tusk placement, the trunk is almost perfect. . . It looks to me like it was drawn by someone who had actually seen an elephant.
mc
If they existed, & now they’re all dead…then we killed them.
We killed the Fairies.
We killed the Unicorns.
How very Human of us.
But not in a good way.
Non non objective, but rather skeptical. Which is a good thing. It is not like hoaxes don’t exist - remember Piltdown Man. If something is real strong evidence will turn up, like it did for the platypus and for meteorites.
Bigfoot is just an unshaven gamer. The hair, the often reported stench, why he is rarely seen outside. Gamer explains it all.
The mythological kraken turned out to be a description of a real animal and I don’t think anybody had their mind blown by it.
The Bigfoot myth probably came from someone who saw a wounded bear walking on 2 legs.
Lemur866:
Biblical zoology expert Rabbi Nathan Slifkin is of the opinion that the re’em was either an aurochs or an oryx, or possibly referred to both when used in different contexts. (Just in case you were wondering, the uncertainty has nothing to do with the similar-sounding English names for those animals.) It definitely was not a rhinoceros, as some contexts refer to it as a kosher animal.
Were I to hear reports of such skeletons as described in the OP, I would immediately conclude they were a scam, specifically because there aren’t enough of those fantastic skeletons. Real animals that really existed on earth didn’t appear out of nowhere; they had families and ancestors and descendants and they leave a decent-sized mark on the fossil record. So things that turn up only once? They’re a scam.
But they might not be a modern scam, and scam might not be the correct term.
In other words, such fossils would make me give serious credence to the possibility that aliens had at once point visited earth and, if nothing else, left a small number of modified or alien creatures behind to finish their lives and die here. That would be the most plausible explanation I can think of for fossils with no predecessors or successors in the fossil record - particularly if genetic testing showed that the fossils really had no connection to earthy species.
Many species of large mammals that are still alive and well and don’t need fossils dug up to prove they exist eluded scientific detection into the 20th century, and several of them like mountain gorilla, komodo dragons, and okapi were considered mythical/folktales until then.
Into the 20th century is vastly different than into the 21st.