World’s longest woolly rhino horn discovered in melting Siberian permafrost
A local resident stumbled upon the remains of the 19,700-year-old beast. Its record-breaking horn offers new insights into life in the Ice Age.
In the far-flung reaches of Yakutia, a rugged corner of Russia that bears the title of the coldest inhabited place on Earth, mysteries lurk beneath the frozen soil.
Roman Romanov, a local hunter, fisherman and fossil collector, uncovered one of those mysteries last summer. While walking along a stream in the tundra, he spotted something emerging from the melting permafrost: a skull and a massive, curved horn poking out of the ground.
Romanov dug up the frozen remains and took them to the Mammoth Museum in the regional capital of Yakutsk, where many creatures pulled from the icy ground are stored and studied. Scientists at the museum determined the skull belonged to a 19,700-year-old woolly rhino. When it roamed the area, it would have been as heavy as an SUV and cloaked in a shaggy coat. The researchers measured the horn at 5 feet 5 inches long.
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They then conducted a comprehensive review of every recorded rhino horn, both living and extinct. From their analysis they determined that the newly unearthed woolly rhino horn is the largest animal horn ever discovered, a finding they published last month in the Journal of Zoology. The new horn beat the previous champion, a white rhino from South Africa, by just two inches.
“We were surprised by how many different conclusions we were able to draw from studying this record-breaking horn,” says Ruslan Belyaev, a zoologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences and an author on the study.
Growth rings etched into the keratin of the new record-holder reveal that the animal lived at least 40 years. Aging studies suggest that wild African rhinos typically live up to 40 years
“For the first time, we were able to show that in the harsh conditions of the Ice Age, woolly rhinos could live as long as modern species,” says Belyaev.
Females had longer horns
The shape of the skull also indicated that the exceptionally long horn belonged to a female. “This is also characteristic of modern African rhinos, whose record-breaking horns came from females,” says Belyaev.
But due to the scarcity of woolly rhino horns available for study, scientists are not sure if females always had longer horns, says Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke, a paleobiologist at the Senckenberg Research Station for Quaternary Paleontology who was not involved with this research.
“We simply do not have enough material,” he says.
Woolly rhino horns average about 3 feet 4 inches long, nearly twice as long the next-longest rhino species, the African white rhino, which averages about 1 foot 11 inches. Kahlke says these massive horns served an unusual purpose. The lower portion of the horn is often flattened, suggesting that these animals repeatedly scraped it against frozen ground to dislodge mouthfuls of frozen grasses, he says.
Like modern rhinos, woolly rhinos likely also used their horns as weapons. Notches in the middle of some of the horns that have been discovered might have formed when they smacked against the horn of another rhino, according to Kahlke.
Scenes of these epic battles have been immortalized in a 30,000-year-old cave painting in France that shows two woolly rhinos clashing. Like many of their relatives, woolly rhinos also had a second, shorter horn closer to their head, which probably shielded their brain during these fights, Kahlke adds.
A frozen goldmine for Ice Age fauna
Woolly rhinos used to roam the mammoth steppe, a cold, dry grassland that stretched across Europe, Asia and Canada. They lived alongside cave lions, woolly mammoths and even humans until they went extinct around 14,000 years ago.
(Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all.)
In addition to woolly rhinos, Yakutia is a gold mine for Ice Age fauna. The region’s deep and extensive permafrost can preserve animals for tens of thousands of years, says Gennady Boeskorov, a paleontologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study.
Just last year, scientists unveiled a 32,000-year-old sabertooth cub pulled from Yakutia’s thawing ice. And as the region’s ice continues to melt, many more long-extinct mammals will be freed. Kahlke suspects the rest of the record-breaking rhino’s body remains buried in the ice nearby, waiting to be found.
