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Nature 446, 979-980 (26 April 2007) | doi:10.1038/446979a; Published online 25 April 2007

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In a hole in the ground...

Henry Gee1

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What happens when you find a hobbit — or a unicorn?

BOOK REVIEWEDThe Discovery of the Hobbit: The Scientific Breakthrough that Changed the Face of Human History

by Mike Morwood & Penny Van Oosterzee

Random House: 2007. 326 pp. Aus $34.95. To be published as A New Human by HarperCollins/Smithsonian in May.

The unicorn, wrote Jorge Luis Borges (in Kafka and His Precursors), is universally regarded as a supernatural being of good omen. But there's a problem: despite its folkloric familiarity, we wouldn't know how to recognize a unicorn if we met one in real life.