You’ve heard of woolly mammoths, but have you heard of woolly rhinos? Well, they existed, and they existed at the same time as the woolly mammoth. Woolly mammoths just have better PR I guess.
Well, now it’s the woolly rhinos time to shine, thanks to some researchers who found some well-preserved woolly rhino remains in Siberia. The remains were found in the Russian permafrost and are suspected to have been stuck in there for around 32,000 years, placing it within the Pleistocene epoch. The specimen was found in the Oymyakonsky District, a mountainous region in eastern Russia that averages 46 to 66°F in the middle of summer. It’s the exact kind of place you would find a well-preserved ancient dead thing.
The woolly rhino is so well-preserved that it still has a lot of soft tissues intact along with a well-preserved horn. This makes the specimen perfect for advanced genetic analysis. CNN spoke to Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics from Stockholm University who has worked with the remains of ancient well-preserved Siberian permafrost animals, who says that “the vast, vast majority of remains from Ice Age animals are bones and teeth without any flesh or skin or anything like that.” He said there’s something like a 1 in 10,000 chance that you find a rhino this well-preserved.
The woolly rhino they found, according to a paper published in a journal called Doklady Earth Sciences, says that the woolly rhino they discovered had a big-ass hump on its back and that it was old as shit and they could tell because its hair darkened and thickened as it aged. They probably said all that more gracefully than I did.
The study didn’t detail exactly how a team of gold miners found the woolly rhino, but it could involve tusk hunters digging through the permafrost looking for woolly mammoth tusks to sell. Local authorities and tusk hunters have an agreement to ensure that the tusk hunters contact paleontologists whenever they make any fascinating discoveries.
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