WOOLLY RHINOS

The woolly rhinoceros is extremely extinct.  You cannot find a live one anywhere, not in Europe or Asia or even in your local zoo.  There are some rhinos in Africa, but they are not woolly, so they are not the kind of rhino I'm going to talk about today.

The hollow teeth look like
they have little faces!

The scientific name for woolly rhinos is Coelodonta antiquitatis.  This translates as "old hollow-tooth," which is kind of a fun nickname for the woolly rhino.  I could not find any explanation about why these animals had hollow teeth.  All I know is that they did.

Woolly rhinos started out about 350,000 years ago.  They mostly lived in the steppes of Eurasia, all the way from Scotland to South Korea.  This was during the Pleistocene Period, so there was lots of snowy and icy weather.  Luckily, the rhinos had a thick, double coat of hair to keep them warm.  Also they had small ears and eyes, and a stocky body.  An adult rhino was about 12 feet long, 6 feet tall, and weighed 2 to 3 tons.  This is bigger than the white rhino, which lives in Africa today.

Woolly rhinos did not live in herds.  They liked to hang out by themselves or maybe with a few other family members.  Nobody knows exactly what they ate, but it was probably grasses and sedges that they got by grazing.  They might have browsed shrubs and short trees, but most scientists think it's more likely that they were grazers and not browsers.

The thing you might notice most about the woolly rhino was that it had two scary-looking horns, which were made of something called keratin.  The bigger horn could be as long as 3 feet.  It was used for scooping snow off the grass, for fighting, and to attract mates.

When people first started finding the bones of woolly rhinos, the only way they knew what the animal looked like was because of some cave paintings in France that dated back about 30,000 years.  Then in 1929, in an oil field in Starunia, Poland, a whole woolly rhino body was found.  It had everything except the hair and the hooves.  You can now see this rhino, who is a female, is in the Academy of Sciences Museum of Natural History in Krakow.

The woolly rhino in the Krakow museum

In the most recent issue of the magazine Science, which just came out on September 2, there is an article about a new woolly rhino in Tibet.  Well, this is not a "new" woolly rhino.  It's actually one that is even older than any woolly rhinos found so far.  This find includes a complete skull, a little bit of the neck, and some of the leg bones.  The name for this rhino is Coelodonta thibetana.  It dates back to the Pliocene Period, 3.6 million years ago, and might mean that woolly rhinos first came from the Himalayas in Tibet.

Back in the days when this Tibetan rhino was first evolving, the climate was warmer, but the Tibetan rhino had a thick, furry coat because it lived high up on the Tibetan Plateau.  Then when the Ice Age came along, the rhinos moved out of the mountains and started living in northern Asia and Europe, where it had also got cold because of the Ice Age.  Woolly rhinos never seem to have crossed the Bering Strait into North America, but my brother Nicky keeps digging in our back yard, and I think he is looking for a fossil bone to show that this theory is wrong.

Anyway, a bunch of big animals such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, and giant sloths all went extinct at about the same time.  This might have been because the humans and the Neanderthals were hunting them.  Or it might have been because of the climate changes at the end of the Ice Age.  Or maybe the animals all caught some disease and died.  Anyway, by 13,000 or 10,000 years ago, the woolly rhino was all gone.  Which is too bad, because I think a dog bed made of nice woolly rhino fur would be the perfect thing to keep me warm this winter!