Coelodonta antiquitatis (Woolly Rhinoceros)

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van der Geer, Alexandra A. E. and Galis, Frietson. (2017). High incidence of cervical ribs indicates vulnerable condition in Late Pleistocene woolly rhinoceroses. PeerJ 5: e3684.

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Extinct Woolly Rhino Reconstructed From Mummified Remains

It's named Sasha after the hunter who found it.

Russian scientists aren't quite sure if their 10,000-year-old Sasha was male or female, but the name, they say, universally applies.

That any of Sasha, the Ice Age woolly rhino, is intact at all has been a surprising find for the researchers who study this bygone period.

Unlike woolly mammoths, which also lived during the Ice Age, woolly rhino remains are rare to find. Their place on the evolutionary timeline is less clear. And their lifestyles—what they ate and how long they lived—is hazy.

REBUILDING SASHA
Last December, a team of scientists from the Paleontological Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Sakha Academy of Sciences in northeastern Russia took the small, slumped remains of Sasha and brought them back to life.

The remains, gray when they were first found, were cleaned. Scientists were surprised to see the young rhino was originally a light strawberry blond color. An analysis of Sasha's teeth revealed the animal was about seven months old when it died.

That it was so young was a surprise to scientists, reports the Siberian Times. Sasha is big for seven months old. It measures almost five feet long and stands about two and a half feet tall. Modern rhinos in Africa typically don't reach that size until 18 months of age.

Read more: news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/sasha-woolly-rhino-mummy-siberia-ice-age-spd/

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Roblíčková, Martina et al. (2017). The mammalian fauna of Barová Cave (Moravian Karst, the Czech). Fossil Imprint 73(3-4): 515-532.

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Irish man’s €60 souvenir turns out to be €30,000 Ice Age relic

An Irishman visiting Morocco who bought a figurine in an antiques shop for €60 has discovered that his holiday souvenir is a 25,000-year-old piece of rhino horn worth tens of thousands of euro.

The self-employed carpenter, who wishes to remain anonymous, visited Chefchaouen, a town in the Rif Mountains of northwest Morocco, inland from Tangier, in 2006, and bought the 6-inch high, carved figurine in an antiques shop that sold “mostly Islamic and Roman items”. The man, who collects antiques “as a hobby”, said he liked the figurine because it looked Chinese. He told The Irish Times that the item was priced at 800 [Moroccan] dirhams but he “haggled and got it for 600 dirhams – about €60”.

He took the piece back to Ireland and began to research it. He believed the figurine was wood painted with lacquer and represented the Chinese Emperor Yongle. He had a hunch that it might date from the 15th-century and said that his constant speculation had his “wife driven mad”.

She persuaded him to get the piece professionally assessed to “settle it”. The couple contacted a specialist company in England and travelled to Oxford where they paid a laboratory £550 (€619) for a radiocarbon dating test which enables scientists to assess the age and composition of materials.

The results showed that the piece was, in fact, not carved from wood, but was instead the horn of a “wooly rhino”– an extinct species of mammal that flourished during the Ice Age – and was 25,000-years-old.

Read more: www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/fine-art-antiques/irish-man-s-60-souvenir-turns-out-to-be-30-000-ice-age-relic-1.3393240

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Rivals, Florent and Álvarez-Lao, Diego J. (In Press, 2018). Ungulate dietary traits and plasticity in zones of ecological transition inferred from late Pleistocene assemblages at Jou Puerta and Rexidora in the Cantabrian Region of northern Spain. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2018.03.024 [Abstract]

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Tiunov, Alexei V. and Kirillova, Irina V. (2010). Stable isotope (13C/12C and 15N/14N) composition of the woolly rhinoceros Coelodonta antiquitatis horn suggests seasonal changes in the diet. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 24(21): 3146-3150. [Abstract]

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Shpansky, A. V. and Boeskorov, G. G. (2018). Northernmost Record of the Merck’s Rhinoceros Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis (Jäger) and Taxonomic Status of Coelodonta jacuticus Russanov (Mammalia, Rhinocerotidae). Paleontological Journal 52(4): 445-462.

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Cappellini, Enrico et al. (2019). Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny. Nature. DOI: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1555-y [Abstract]

[Melanie]

New sensational find from Yakutia:

Siberia permafrost yields well-preserved ice age woolly rhino

A well-preserved ice age woolly rhino with many of its internal organs still intact has been recovered from the permafrost in Russia’s extreme northern region.

Russian media reported on Wednesday that the carcass was revealed by thawing permafrost in Yakutia in August. Scientists are waiting for ice roads in the Arctic region to become passable to deliver the animal to a laboratory for studies in January.

The carcass is among the best preserved specimens of the woolly rhino found to date. Most of the soft tissues are still intact, including part of the intestines, some thick hair and a lump of fat. Its horn was found next to it.
Scientists say these woolly rhino remains will be taken to a laboratory for radiocarbon investigation next year
Scientists say the Yakutia woolly rhino remains, pictured here, will be taken to a laboratory for radiocarbon investigation next year.

In recent years, as the ice inside the permafrost increasingly melts, across vast areas of Siberia because of global warming, there have been significant discoveries of mammoths, woolly rhinos and cave lion cubs. A foal – known as the Lena horse – alive 42,000 years ago was found in the permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, Siberia.
Remains of ice age cave bear found preserved in Russian Arctic

Yakutia 24 TV quoted Valery Plotnikov, a paleontologist with the regional branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, saying that the woolly rhino was probably three or four years old when it died. Plotnikov said the young rhino could have drowned.

Scientists dated the carcass from 20,000 years to 50,000 years ago. More precise dating will be possible once radiocarbon studies can be done at a laboratory.

The carcass was found on the bank of the Tirekhtyakh river, in the Abyisk district, close to the area where another young woolly rhino was recovered in 2014. Researchers dated that specimen, which they called Sasha, at 34,000 years old.

www.theguardian.com/science/2020/dec/30/siberia-permafrost-yields-well-preserved-ice-age-woolly-rhino

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Rey-Iglesia, Alba et al. (2021). Late Pleistocene palaeoecology and phylogeography of woolly rhinoceroses. bioRxiv preprint. doi: doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.08.425884

[Melanie]

52,000 years of woolly rhinoceros population dynamics reveal extinction mechanisms

Abstract
The extinction of the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) at the onset of the Holocene remains an enigma, with conflicting evidence regarding its cause and spatiotemporal dynamics. This partly reflects challenges in determining demographic responses of late Quaternary megafauna to climatic and anthropogenic causal drivers with available genetic and paleontological techniques. Here, we show that elucidating mechanisms of ancient extinctions can benefit from a detailed understanding of fine-scale metapopulation dynamics, operating over many millennia. Using an abundant fossil record, ancient DNA, and high-resolution simulation models, we untangle the ecological mechanisms and causal drivers that are likely to have been integral in the decline and later extinction of the woolly rhinoceros. Our 52,000-y reconstruction of distribution-wide metapopulation dynamics supports a pathway to extinction that began long before the Holocene, when the combination of cooling temperatures and low but sustained hunting by humans trapped woolly rhinoceroses in suboptimal habitats along the southern edge of their range. Modeling indicates that this ecological trap intensified after the end of the last ice age, preventing colonization of newly formed suitable habitats, weakening stabilizing metapopulation processes, triggering the extinction of the woolly rhinoceros in the early Holocene. Our findings suggest that fragmentation and resultant metapopulation dynamics should be explicitly considered in explanations of late Quaternary megafauna extinctions, sending a clarion call to the fragility of the remaining large-bodied grazers restricted to disjunct fragments of poor-quality habitat due to anthropogenic environmental change.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316419121

[Melanie]

Woolly rhino found preserved in Russian permafrost after 32,000 years

edition.cnn.com/2024/09/25/science/woolly-rhino-mummy-preserved-permafrost-intl-scli/index.html