Ice Age Beasts In Europe: Migration Of The Woolly Rhinoceros Earlier Than Assumed

November 12, 2008

The newly described skull of the oldest woolly rhinoceros in Europe shows that these giant creatures – with two impressively large horns on the bridge of their noses – once roamed across central Germany. The large shaggy mammals grazed at the foot of the Kyffhäuser range, whose unforested, rocky slopes loomed out of the broad, bleak plains of northern Thuringia 460,000 years ago. The climate at this time was icy cold and far drier than today.

At the time, the brow of a glacier existed only a few kilometres away, which expanded during the Elsterian ice age from Scandinavia towards the southwest and spread across the monotonous grassland. But well adapted creatures such as mammoths, reindeer, musk ox and other cold climate animals were able to survive in what was known as the mammoth steppe and found suitable food sources here. The uniform type of vegetation that emerged under these particular climatic conditions once stretched from the coasts of the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific and extended as far as central Europe in the west.

“This is the oldest woolly rhinoceros found in Europe, and it gives us a precise date for the first appearance of cold climate animals spreading throughout Asia and Europe during the ice ages. The characteristic species of mammals emerged together and across the continent”, is how palaeontologist Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke explains the finding’s significance.

Woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta tologoijensis). (Credit: Copyright Senckenberg Research Institute)

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