A "Siberian unicorn" may have walked with the first humans | Science

Our first parents may have already walked with unicorns. But Elasmotherium sibiricum, commonly known as the Siberian unicorn, probably looked more like a thick, hairy rhinoceros with a horn that was one meter long than a pure white horse. Previous estimates put E. sibiricum extinct 200,000 years ago, but new specimens suggest that it may have survived until about 39,000 years ago, briefly overlapping the first humans in the region, Gizmodo reports. Isotopic fossil analyzes have shown that the rhinoceros lived on a diet of hard, dry grasses, and probably died out when the changing climate of the ice age wiped out its main food source, researchers said this week. Nature Ecology & Evolution. The analysis of DNA has also shown E. sibiricum to separate from modern rhinos on the evolutionary tree about 43 million years ago.