This artist's reconstruction shows a woolly rhinoceros grazing in the plains of northern Thuringia in Germany. Credit: Dionisio Álvarez.
Posted on 11/13/2008 7:12:44 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A woolly rhinoceros was just 12 years old when it died in a pool of meltwater flowing off an inland glacier in Germany. That was 460,000 years ago. Now, scientists have pieced together the skull of this extinct mega-mammal and found it to be the oldest woolly rhinoceros in Europe.
The skull was discovered more than a century ago in a gravel pit at the foot of the Kyffhäuser range, near Bad Frankenhausen (a town in Germany), but it was broken into more than 50 fragments.
"This is the oldest woolly rhinoceros found in Europe, and it gives us a precise date for the first appearance of cold-climate animals spreading throughout Asia and Europe during the ice ages," said researcher Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke, a paleontologist at the Frankfurt Senckenberg Research Institute.
The reconstructed skull reveals that like other rhinoceroses these large mammals, called Coelodonta tologoijensis, sported two big horns on the bridges of their noses, Kahlke said. The woolly rhinos apparently roamed central Germany at the foot of the unforested, rocky slopes of the Kyffhäuser range that loomed out of the broad, bleak plains of northern Thuringia. The climate at the time was icy cold and far drier than today, and fluctuated a great deal.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
This artist's reconstruction shows a woolly rhinoceros grazing in the plains of northern Thuringia in Germany. Credit: Dionisio Álvarez.
Rinos were a dying breed even back then. *rimshot*
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Talk about one ancient RINO!
probably old US Rino’s, stupid and woolly
Two seconds?!? You beat me by two lousy seconds?!? ;’)
The resemblance is uncanny.
(ducks for cover)
Uno, Dos...One, Two, Tres, Quatro — !
RINO: The Other White Meat.
“Woolly Rhinoceros Discovery Is Oldest in Europe”
FREE WOOLLY!!!!!
A story about dead RINOs.
How timely!
LOL! Thanks!
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