2015-10-15 09:44:56
About three and a half million years ago, in the mid-Pliocene, Earth’s climate was warmer than it is today. But on the Tibetan plateau the climate was very cold and it seems that it was there that the ancestors of one of the most famous animals of the glacial periods appeared, the woolly rhinoceros. These ancestors were small, slender rhinos, just like their closest living relative, the Sumatran rhino.
Later, when the climate of the entire planet cooled, the glacial steppe tundra, and with it the woolly rhinoceros, spread across Eurasia. One of the most common adaptations to cold weather is to increase in size, to minimize heat loss; Woolly rhinos grew to be slightly larger than white rhinos: between 10 and 12 feet long, 6 to 7 feet tall at the withers, and weighing 2 to 3 tons. The head alone is about a meter long.
At its peak around 30,000 years ago, the woolly rhinoceros was present from Scandinavia and Great Britain, which was then attached to the mainland, to the Asian Pacific coast, as far south as the Iberian peninsula, the southern Caucasus and southeast China. However, he never crossed the Bering Isthmus, which at the time linked the eastern tip of Asia with Alaska.
The woolly rhinoceros is one of the best known fossil mammals. In addition to hundreds of fossil skeletons, we have frozen specimens from Siberia, and in 1929 a complete specimen was discovered, a female, perfectly preserved in the bituminous brine fossil deposits near the town of Starunia, in the Ukrainian Carpathians. At that time the region belonged to Poland, so the specimen, which is missing only the hair and hooves, is kept in the Natural History Museum of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow. There are also cave paintings depicting woolly rhinos, which give us a lot of information about what these animals looked like. Nearly a hundred of these images are known, of which more than half are in the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994 in the south of France.
From the remains of plants that have been preserved between the teeth of the fossils, and from the stomach contents that have been preserved in some specimens, we know that woolly rhinos were basically grazers; grass represented 95% of their diet, although they also ate other herbaceous plants, as well as moss and some shrubs, such as willows and birches. The animal’s anatomy is adapted for this type of feeding: the mouth and lips are wide, similar to those of the white rhinoceros, and the head, in a resting position, is kept low, close to the ground.
The woolly rhinoceros has two horns, of which the anterior is generally four times as long as the posterior, although it can also be the same length or even slightly shorter. The anterior horn, located at the end of the snout, measures between 60 centimeters and more than a meter in length, is curved and very flattened, like a saber with a blunt tip, while the posterior horn, between the eyes, is wider. , almost conical, and with a rounded tip. The horns are made up of light and dark bands, which if they are bands of annual growth indicate that these animals could live more than thirty years, like today’s rhinos. Despite its thinness, the anterior horn was very strong. Some rock paintings show rhinos fighting each other with their horns, and wear marks on the leading edge of the horn indicate that they also used it to dig in the snow for food, so they weren’t forced to migrate like other animals. in the winter. One year ago, in 2014, a team of researchers found a 13,000-year-old javelin point made from 90-year-old woolly rhinoceros horn on Great Liajov Island in the New Siberian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. centimeters in length.
The ears of the woolly rhinoceros are narrower than those of living rhinos; They are lanceolate in shape, with a rounded tip. A huge hump, adorned by a short mane, covers the shoulders, neck and back of the head. The legs are short and thick, and the tail is short and flattened, with long hairs on the edges and at the tip.
The coat is long, and is made up of fine light hairs and thicker, darker hairs. In some cave paintings the belly and legs are hidden under a floor-length wool curtain, but in others they are not. Perhaps it is a seasonal fur that protects from the intense cold in winter, but is lost in the summer. Rock paintings show that the woolly rhinoceros was brown in color. In Western Europe, a more or less wide black stripe is also shown that surrounds the middle area of the animal, between the legs. It is possible that it is a distinctive feature of the race or subspecies that inhabited that region. This black girdle sometimes extends from the shoulders to the hips, but other times it is narrow like a belt and only covers the region near the pelvis. Under the fur, the skin is covered by small bumps.
The last woolly rhinos lived in Western Siberia about 10,000 years ago; their extinction does not coincide with the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago, but with the period called the Younger Dryas, a later sudden cooling probably caused by the interruption of the North Atlantic ocean currents due to the massive flow of fresh water from from melting glaciers. But with global warming, the glacial steppe tundra disappeared, and with it the woolly rhino.
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