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Vaniver comments on Excluding the Supernatural - Less Wrong
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I think this depends a lot on your exposure to centaur and unicorn myths. Both creatures were imagined in Greece; the centaur was just a mashup of man and horse, and the unicorn was just a kind of horned donkey found in faraway places. Thus, if you slapped a horn on some donkeys (or just found an oryx) you'd have a Greek unicorn.
But in medieval Europe, the unicorn became a symbol of purity, able to cure diseases and drawn to virgins. Oryxes can't cure diseases and aren't drawn to (human) virgins, which to a large extent is the point of a unicorn (to someone who adopts the medieval European imagination of unicorns).
Yeah, that must be the reason. I'm not familiar with mediaeval myths about unicorns, so it means pretty much “a horse with a horn” (but I wouldn't count an oryx as one -- the uni- part means it has to only have one horn, doesn't it :-)), but on the other hand I know about the myth of the mermaids' singing (and Ulysses's strategy to cope with it) so I wouldn't count the top half of a woman glued onto the bottom half of a fish as one.
Interestingly, mermaid myths may have been deliberate hoaxes, which makes the question of a "real" mermaid even muddier.
I'm not sure how Ctesias or Aristotle would react to seeing an oryx- they might decide it's a new duoceros different from monoceri or they might say "oops, I guess we only saw depictions of monoceri in profile, they actually have two horns."