Woolly rhinoceros preserved in permafrost for 32,000 years
Scientist have discovered a woolly rhinoceros in the Russian permafrost for 32,000 years. The animal is so well preserved that its skin and fur remain intact. This woolly rhinoceros died when it was just around four years old. Its age combined with its excellent preservation thanks to the permafrost has helped scientists learn more about the now-extinct species.
“The vast, vast majority of remains from Ice Age animals are bones and teeth without any flesh or skin or anything like that,” Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University told CNN. Dalén was not involved with the study but had studied the remains of other animals that were found in the Siberian permafrost and were similarly preserved.
“There’s probably one in 10,000 or something like that where you run into something like this (rhino). With that said, there are lots of samples coming out of the permafrost every year so it seems to happen almost on a yearly basis.”
The findings are detailed in a paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences. It revealed that the woolly rhinoceros had a large fatty hump on its back and its fur changed colour as the animal grew.
When this woolly rhinoceros had lived in Eastern Siberia over 30,000 years ago, it would have been among the largest herbivores “in the Ice age ecosystem” with only the woolly mammoth being larger, according to Dalén who added that it would graze on the grasslands there.
Like today’s rhinos, this animal had two horns, one of which was “a very large blade-shaped horn which is quite unique,” he added. This is in contrast with the more round horns we see in living rhinos.
When this animal died, it lay in the permafrost until a team of researchers from the Russian institutions in Yakutsk and Moscow discovered it on the banks of the Tirekhtyakh River in August 2020.
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Image: Emőke Dénes
