A recurring scholarly reading of the karkadann treats it not as a pure invention but as a garbled, secondhand description of a genuine animal, the rhinoceros, encountered by travelers, merchants or soldiers moving through territory where the animal was native and then relayed, in the way of oral report passed across languages and long distances, to audiences who had never seen one and had no comparable reference point for a large, thick-hided, single-horned mammal. Under this reading, the karkadann's exaggerated ferocity, its elephant-goring strength and its unnaturally large size would represent the kind of amplification travelers' tales commonly acquire in transmission, rather than pure fantasy invented without any underlying zoological referent at all.
The theory is offered by scholars of the tradition as a plausible origin rather than as settled fact, since no single named source can be shown to be the specific report that started the legend, and the karkadann as described in the literary tradition, poison-detecting horn included, had clearly become its own distinct legendary figure well before any question of accurate zoological reporting would have mattered to the audiences enjoying the stories. What the theory does capture usefully is the broader pattern by which several of the ancient and medieval world's single-horned beast legends, including accounts some classical writers gave of the Indian ass, appear to trace back to real, if imperfectly described, large mammals rather than arising from nothing.