The woolly rhinoceros — identified to scientists as any species of rhinos below the genus Coelodonta — roamed the planet up until 12,000 years in the past, spreading throughout Asia, Europe, and North Africa.
“It had an enormous geographical vary,” says Pierre-Olivier Antoine, a specialist in Cenozoic megamammals on the Université de Montpellier, in France. It was clad in a thick, shabby coat of rust-colored fur to climate winter storms of the Ice Ages. As such, the bushy beasts earned the nickname “woolly rhino”.
What Did The Woolly Rhino Look Like?
That is artist Julie Naylor’s rendering of Tibetan woolly rhino (Credit score: Julie Naylor)
As one of many Ice Age megafauna, the woolly rhinoceros was greater than 6 ft tall and 16 ft lengthy, sporting two large keratin horns on the entrance of its head. Since a number of the specimens scientists have discovered had damaged ribs and horns, consultants theorize the rhinos might have additionally used them for protection or for sexual combats — and have been presumably aggressive animals.
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The horns have been additionally barely flattened, as they have been in all probability used to scrape by thick layers of snow overlaying the bottom to be able to munch away on the inexperienced grasses required by its herbivore weight-reduction plan.
“That they had a seasonal weight-reduction plan, and so they additionally browsed conifer leaves and different leaves that have been accessible of their atmosphere,” says Antoine, noting how scientists have discovered pollen residue within the mummified abdomen of 1 specific specimen. “They eat no matter they’ll eat.”
How Did the Woolly Rhino Evolve?
The long-lasting, fortress of an animal most of us know because the woolly rhino at this time roamed throughout Europe and Asia all through the Ice Ages. However analysis revealed within the journal Science in 2011 described a fossil from a specimen present in 2007 and courting all the way in which 3.6 million years in the past, earlier than the Ice Ages, within the Tibetan Plateau, the world’s highest and largest plateau.
The novel species described from these stays, dubbed the C. thibetana, is on the foundation of a idea that the woolly rhino developed a complete million years earlier than all the planet received chilly. Throughout that point, temperatures have been truly simply as heat as at this time, however Tibet would have been so north that temperatures ranged between -10 and 0°C (or 14 and 32°F), in response to the examine — an ideal spot for a shaggy, chunky animal to seek out its evolutionary cradle.
Fossil information discovered after this specimen counsel that different species then quickly developed in China and Siberia in the course of the Ice Age: C. nihowanensis and C. tologoijensis. When the entire planet froze up by the Ice Ages, the woolly rhinoceros unfold over all of Eurasia and gave beginning to a different species, C. antiquitatis, which survived lengthy sufficient to fulfill our human ancestors.
The place Did The Woolly Rhino Come From?
Nonetheless, simply because the Tibetan specimen is the oldest woolly rhino to be found, it doesn’t imply it was the primary one to evolve, in response to Antoine. “Or that it developed from nothing,” he says.
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Earlier than genomic knowledge turned accessible for this species, paleontologists like Antoine believed that, given they share a number of bodily options akin to tooth and cranium form, woolly rhinos have been carefully associated to at this time’s extant black and white rhinos.
But seminal genomic analyses have since instructed these similarities between woolly rhinos and black and white rhinos have been truly simply convergences, in response to Antoine — instances by which related options crop up in several branches of the evolutionary tree independently. On this case, due to the grazing weight-reduction plan frequent to all rhinos.
“This knowledge reveals the woolly rhino is definitely carefully associated to the Sumatran rhino,” says Antoine, referring to the uncommon, small rhinos with two horns and lengthy hair that also roam our lands at this time. “The one [modern rhinoceros species] with the fur.”
How Many Woolly Rhino Fossils Are There?
Regardless of the woolly rhino’s contentious origin story, a plethora of C. antiquitatis fossils have truly cropped up during the last decade, giving consultants loads of materials to be taught extra concerning the animal and its evolution and life-style.
“The true woolly rhino, it has one thing like 1,200 fossil occurrences in Eurasia,” says Antoine, greater than the present inhabitants of Sumatran and Javan rhinos put collectively. “It is a superb file; it’s simply unparalleled.”
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Many of those discoveries aren’t simply fossils, however whole preserved carcasses, mummified contained in the permafrost, a few of which nonetheless have fur and comfortable tissue intact. A mummified child rhino with its fur and comfortable tissues preserved in permafrost was present in an iconic 2014 discovery, dubbed “Sasha,” and reconstructed for a museum show in Russia. Antoine’s favourite is a sub-complete skeleton discovered within the Aven de Coulon Collapse Southern France,
A lot much less is thought about C. thibetana, C. nihowanensis and C. tologoijensis, that are solely identified by one to a dozen particular person specimens, making it a lot more durable to study their existence.
Why Did Woolly Rhinos Change into Extinct?
All through their very lengthy existence on this planet, woolly rhinos co-existed with our human ancestors for about 16,000 years.
We even cherished to depict them of their cave drawings, like in these brilliantly-accurate drawings present in Chauvet–Pont d’Arc in France from 30,000 years in the past. In these Stone Age work, the rhinos are combating one another, or being stabbed with arrows and spears, suggesting we tried to hunt them.
It in all probability wasn’t people who killed off the whole thing of woolly rhinos, although. Moderately, a sudden change in local weather round 14,700 years in the past might have led to their demise. To scientists, this 2,000-year-long time period in prehistory is often known as the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, and it represents the tip of the final Ice Age.
That period is when gigantic Pleistocene ice sheets started to shortly retreat, melting and elevating sea ranges within the course of — and leaving animals used to surviving in a frigid atmosphere in a a lot hotter world.
When Did the Woolly Rhino Go Extinct?
A examine revealed in Present Biology in 2020, and a subsequent paper revealed in Cell simply the next 12 months, which Antoine labored on, each pored over a bunch of knowledge on the woolly rhino’s DNA and have been in a position to map its inhabitants development and decline with precision.
“Rhino inhabitants was actually excessive about 30,000 years in the past, on the onset of the Final Glacial Most, the coldest interval near us,” says Antoine. “However 15 to 14,000 years in the past they have been extirpated. By the tip, solely a small inhabitants was surviving, within the North.”
Given some preliminary knowledge coming from the evaluation of sediment samples and rhino dung, although, Antoine has a hunch they could have lived as much as 10,000 years in the past. “It might be believable that the final bones are from 14,000 years in the past, and the final people might have lived somewhat time after, however their bones are usually not preserved.”
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