Woolly Rhinos

I don't have the warm feeling for woolly rhinoceroses that I've got for woolly mammoths, but I do have some curiosity about a species that would go to that much trouble to survive in such an inhabitable environment. Why didn't they just move south to a milder climate? I suppose they weren't migratory to begin with, so they wouldn't have had any idea that the climate was different anywhere else.

Woolly rhinos are now extinct, but they were common throughout Europe and Asia during the last glacial period. No remains of them have been found in North America, so it would seem they did not travel across the Bering Strait Land Bridge.

There were 2 sub-species of woolly rhinos, both covered with long, thick hair in order to survive the extremely harsh, cold mammoth steppe. They had large humps reaching up from the shoulders, and fed mainly on grasses and sedges, which are flowering grass-like plants. It had a wide upper lip that allowed it to pluck vegetation directly from the ground. It also ate woody plants such as alders, conifers and willows.

The remains of woolly rhinos had been known for a long time before the species was described. Often, they were attributed to some mythical creatures. Some believed their horns were the claws of a giant bird. One skull was assumed to be that of a dragon.

The oldest known woolly rhinoceros fossil was 3.6 million years old, discovered on the Tibetan Plateau in 2011. A study of DNA samples indicate that the closest living relative of woolly rhinos is the Sumatran rhinoceros.

An adult woolly rhino could measure up to 11.8 ft (3.6 metres) from head to tail, could have stood 5.2 ft (1.6 metres) tall at the shoulder, and weighed as much as 2 tons. Both males and females had 2 horns, a long one of 4.4 ft (1.35 metres) near the end of the nose, and a shorter one of 1.56 ft (47.5 centimetres) between the eyes. These horn measurements are for fully grown specimens. The woolly rhino had a longer head and body and shorter legs than other rhinos. Its shoulder hump was used to support the animal's massive front horn, but it also held fat to aid survival through the desolate winters when food was scarce. It is believed that woolly rhinos could reach the age of 40.

Based on frozen specimens, the rhino's fur coat was reddish-brown, with a thick undercoat under a layer of long, coarse hair. The tail was no longer than 20 inches (50 centimetre). Females had 2 nipples on her udder, indicating they probably gave birth to one calf at a time, although there might occasionally be two. Births would have occurred every 2 to 3 years.

Not only were their tail relatively shorter than those of hot climate rhinos, so were their ears, reaching no longer than 9.5 inches (24 cm) compared to the 12 inches (30 cm) of other rhinos. Woolly rhinos also had thick skin, ranging up to 5/8 inch (15 mm) on the chest and shoulders.

The woolly rhino skull's length gave the head a deeply downward-facing slant. Strong muscles in its neck held the massive skull in place. Like other rhinos, they did not have incisors, only premolars and molars, with which they ground up the vegetation they ate.

Adults had few predators, because of their massive horns and size, but young individuals could be attacked by hyenas, cave lions and other such animals. One skull indicated an attack from a feline, but that individual survived to adulthood.

Woolly rhinos probably used their horns for moving snow to uncover vegetation during winter, as well as for combat. Some cave paintings depict 2 woolly rhinos fighting each other.

The woolly rhinoceros lived mainly in dry to arid climates in lowlands, plateaus and river valleys, with migrations to higher elevations in favorable climate phases. It could not easily cross heavy snow and steep terrain of mountain ranges, so it avoided them. Other large herbivores, such as the woolly mammoth, giant deer, reindeer, saiga antelope and bison, lived alongside it.

By 130,000 years ago, woolly rhinos lived throughout most of Europe, the Russian Plain, Siberia and the Mongolian Plateau, which gave it the widest range of any rhinoceros species.

Humans shared that habitat, but evidence that they interacted is rare. However, many cave paintings do depict woolly rhinoceroses. About 20 such drawings of woolly rhinos are dated at over 31,000 years old.

It is postulated that the woolly rhinoceros went extinct because of the changing climate as the ice age neared its end. There are indications that some population survived until about 10,000 BC in western Siberia. Many rhino remains have been found in the permafrost region. The known history of these discoveries starts in 1771.

All in all, I don't want to meet one of these critters in a cold, dark alley. Or anywhere else, come to think of it. I assume they couldn't see any better than their present-day brethren, but they probably made up for it by attacking anything that moved, whether they knew what it was or not.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_rhinoceros

Back When Elephants Wore Coats

The Wooly Mammoth was one of the last mammoth species to become extinct. Its closest still-living relative is the Asian elephant. Mammoths used the Bering Land Bridge to migrate from Siberia to North America. Present day Alaska and Canada (and some of New England) were home to the Wooly mammoth, while another species, the Columbian mammoth, lived in the area covered today by the 48 mainland states, and as far south as Costa Rica. Recent DNA studies indicate that that Wooly mammoths and Columbian mammoths could and did impregnate each other.

The Woolly mammoth evolved in Siberia some 400,000 years ago. Some of them entered North America about 100,000 by crossing the Bering Land Bridge. I found several dates for extinction, such as 5,700 years ago in the Yukon (Canada), 5,600 years ago on St Paul Island (Alaska), 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island (Russia), to 3,900 years ago on the Taymyr Peninsula (Russia). So yes, they co-existed with humans, who used mammoth bones and tusks for making art, tools, dwellings and as food.

Woolly mammoths are among the best studied prehistoric animal because of the discovery of frozen carcasses (Siberia & N America), as well as teeth, stomach contents, dung, and the depiction of them in prehistoric cave paintings. This species became known to Europeans in the 17th century, but had been known in Asia long before that.

Woolly mammoths were roughly the same size as modern African elephants. Males could reach shoulder heights of 11 ft and weighed up to 6 tons, while females reached a shoulder height of about 8 ft, and weighed up to 4 tons. A newborn calf weighed about 200 lbs, and would have been nursed for 3 years before being weaned to a diet of grasses and such. An individual could probably live for 60 years.

Well adapted to the cold ice age, the Woolly mammoth was covered in fur, which varied from dark to light. The ears and tail were short to minimize frostbite and heat loss. It had long, curved tusks, which it used for manipulating objects, fighting and foraging. Its diet was mainly grasses and sedges (a large family of flowering grass-like plants). Its habitat stretched across northern Eurasia and North America.

A genome project for the woolly mammoth was completed in 2015. It has been proposed that the species could be revived, but none of the methods proposed are yet feasible. One article I read postulated that reviving the species could possibly help stabilize the tundra areas of the far north, helping to mitigate the climate change those areas are experiencing, but their reasoning didn't make much sense to me. Having these large creatures roam through the thawing tundra, even if they drag seeds along with them, is not going to halt the thawing of the permafrost. The woolly mammoths could not survive when the rising temperatures melted the huge glaciers of the ice age, and I don't see how they would survive now, when the temperature is even higher.

In my opinion, bringing ice age critters back to life now would only be dooming them to a short, miserable existence before they once again go extinct.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth

Christmas Eve!

Today is Christmas Eve. Or, rather, the day I post this will be Christmas Eve day. You’d think I’d write about Christmas, wouldn’t you? But I’ve already discussed holidays, several times during the life of this blog, and I don’t want to get too repetitive.

Besides, as I write this, I am nowhere near ready for that holiday; I still have gifts to purchase (not to mention wrap, NONE of them are wrapped yet), a grocery list to make, groceries to buy, and an entire house to clean. These things have been weighing on my mind since Thanksgiving, and I need a break from thinking about Christmas.

So, I’ve been reviewing some science stories I down-loaded during 2014 but never got around to incorporating into a blog, trying to figure out what to say in my next several blogs. (It’s called advanced planning, something I probably don’t do enough of.) There’s some good stuff here.

1.              The Willy Wonka elevator is not necessarily pure fiction.

2.              The Keppler telescope isn’t dead yet. In fact, they’ve fixed it... sort of.

3.              Everybody is talking about a trip to Mars, but Venus is much closer, so... Yeah, there’s plans for that!

4.              There’s a big geothermal project in western US.

5.              Lab-grown burgers.

6.              Rocks that mysteriously move by themselves when no one is looking.

7.              Roads made of solar panels.

8.              Wyoming cave has a treasure of Ice Age fossils.

9.              Cloning woolly mammoths. (Or have I already done that one?)

10.                    Robot farmers.

11.                    Blood test for suicide.

12.                    2-million-year-old pre-man, what was he like?

13.                    Ancient Caribou hunting.

14.                    Ancient lizard fish graveyard.

15.                    Ancient Chinese flying reptile.

16.                    Ancient squirrel.

17.                    Chatting with a Stone Age person.

18.                    Ancient Tsunamis.

19.                    Ichthyosaur fossil.

20.                    The first bird.

21.                    Pinocchio Rex.

22.                    The Scourge of Jurassic Europe.

23.                    Ancient footprints in UK.

24.                    6,000-year-old parasite egg.

25.                    Ancient men and their dog buddies.

26.                    Stonehenge skeleton.

27.                    Fossil eggs.

28.                    Do failed stars have planets?

29.                    Super Earth.

30.                    Orphan planets.

31.                    Twin planets.

Jeepers. That’s enough for half of next year, even if I don’t have enough info on some of them. Maybe I should keep this list and cross them off as I write that blog. After all, I wouldn’t want to repeat myself.

And that doesn’t count any subjects I come across in Archeology, Discovery and the other magazines that I read. Or any new stories I come across on the internet.

Well, my cup runneth over, I guess. The problem will be deciding which of these to write about when. Any suggestions what you’d like me to start with?

Giant Extinction

For a long time, some people have blamed man for the extinction of such ice age wonders as the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. To them, I guess ‘man’ was ‘the great killer’, killing animals right and left, indiscriminately, and with no thought to the consequences.

That never seemed quite fair to me. Yes, I know that white men came to the Americas and slaughtered whole herds of buffalo just because they could. There are stupid people in the world, after all. But those men had guns. And although large, American buffalo are not giants.

True, the American buffalo is only slightly smaller in size than the woolly rhinoceros, but the rhinoceros weighed quite a bit more - as much as 3.5 tons compared to the 1 ton for the largest and heaviest American buffalo. And a woolly mammoth could easily stand twice as tall as a human and weigh 6 tons.

There were no guns during the last ice age. Man had spears, arrows, knives and possibly a couple other men to help him kill these giants. Would you like to pit your skills with such ancient types of weapons against a modern elephant or rhinoceros?

I doubt if ice age men saw such hunts as sport. Hunting was a necessity to feed the tribe, and if they could find some rabbits, fish, fowl or other animals smaller than a woolly giant, I’m sure they would have been happy to carry those home. Don’t get me wrong; humans probably did kill some of the giants, but I personally think they would have rather avoided such a dangerous practice.

Scientists have been studying the flora that could be found during the last ice age, as well as the stomach and feces contents of frozen woolly animals. It seems the ground where these creatures roamed was covered in wildflowers that were high in protein. But when the weather warmed up, the flowers died off, leaving only grasses that could not satisfy the giants’ nutritional needs.

And so the woolly giants followed the lead of those wildflowers and died off.