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About 20,000 years ago, a young woolly rhino lived its day as usual in the icy region of what is now northern Siberia. In the search for food, something probably went wrong with the young animal who drowned in the Tirekhtyakh River or in an area of water nearby.
Fast forward a few millennia and the tragic fate of this woolly rhino that day became a pathologist’s dream come true. Aided by melting permafrost due to a trend of rising temperatures, long-extinct creatures such as the Woolly Rhino are discovered and shed new light on unknown prehistoric eras.
An exceptionally well preserved woolly rhinoceros with its last meal still intact found in arctic Yakutia. The juvenile rhinoceros with the thick, hazel-colored coat was 3-4 years old when it died at least 20,000 years ago; his horn was found next to the carcass https://t.co/7hc1HnYuD0 pic.twitter.com/nS52DRp04c
– Siberian time (@siberian_times) December 29, 2020
Permafrost is a permanently frozen layer of soil that has been frozen over for a long time, sometimes several thousand years.
The ancient carcass was discovered by a local farmer in Yakutia, Siberia, in August 2020, around 15,000 years after the woolly rhino went extinct. The fossil was found with a fur coat, hooves and internal organs fully intact, giving scientists a crucial puzzle piece about the creatures’ anatomy, behaviors, and lives.
Video of the fossil dig was shared online by The Siberian Times. As the pictures show, paleontologists have taken great care to preserve as much of the rhino’s structure. Their successes kept 80% of the sample intact, a revolutionary effort.
“The young rhino was between 3 and 4 years old and was living apart from his mother when he died, possibly by drowning,” paleontologist Valery Plotnikov told the Siberian Times.
Plotnikov, who works with the Russian Academy of Sciences, added that the gender of the woolly rhino is still unknown and that a radiocarbon analysis is needed to confirm the general time range the rhino likely lived.
The horn of the young animal was next to the rhino carcass, an exceptional find, according to Plotnikov, due to the speed with which the cartilage usually breaks down. The markings on the horn, he said, also shed more light on how the species used it for food.
The newly discovered frozen creature is not the first woolly rhino to be discovered in the area, as another specimen preserved in ice was unearthed in 2015. This rhino, nicknamed Sasha, was the first baby woolly rhino ever discovered and is believed to have roamed the region about 34,000 years ago.
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Like the newly discovered rhino, Sasha was found with a layer of wool fully intact and was also reportedly drowned. However, unlike the recent rhino, Sasha’s fur was strawberry blonde and the carcass lacked horn before.
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A carcass of a juvenile woolly rhino, found in permafrost in August 2020 on the banks of the Tirekhtyakh River in the Yakutia region of eastern Siberia, Russia, is seen in this undated photo obtained by Reuters on December 30, 2020. (Department of Study of Mammoth Fauna of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) via REUTERS) |
The historically high temperatures in the normally icy region have revealed perfectly preserved fossils that had previously been buried under thousands of years of thick ice. Last summer, shortly before the remains were found, record temperatures were recorded in cities around the Arctic Circle.
“Temperatures soared 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) above average last month in Siberia, where much of the Earth’s permafrost is found, as the world experienced its hottest May on record. registered, “according to the European Union’s climate monitoring network.
AccuWeather meteorologist Maura Kelly wrote in June that the prolonged period of heat had triggered permafrost melting in northern Siberia.
“The record temperatures in May followed a record start to 2020 across Russia,” she wrote at the time in an article for AccuWeather.com. “January through April temperatures across the country were on average about 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal.”
Recently, the new woolly rhino fossil was transported to scientists for further testing thanks to the newly constructed ice roads in Yakutia. In the years to come, the slowly receding sheet of ice is sure to unveil even more frozen puzzle pieces, continually putting together the jigsaw puzzle of our ancestors and previously hidden generations of life.
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