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Today there are just five surviving species of rhino, but at different times in the
Weighing up to 3.5 tonnes, it lived on the Eurasian grasslands ranging from southwestern Russia and Ukraine to Kazakhstan and Siberia.
For those studying the wildlife of the last Ice Age, one of the most significant events of the period was the megafaunal extinction. It saw the disappearance of many large, iconic species such as the woolly mammoth, the Irish elk and the
Prof. Adrian Lister, Merit Researcher at the Museum, says, 'This megafaunal extinction event did not really get going until about 40,000 years ago. Sound Elasmotherium With its apparent extinction date of 100,000 years ago, you have not been considered part of that same event. '
Over the past few years, however, there have been some hints that this extinction date for E.
'We dated a few specimens – such as the beautiful complete skull we have at the Museum – and to our
On its
'They strongly strongly confirmed that this species survived until at least 39,000 years ago, and maybe as late as 35,000 years ago,' says Adrian. The results have been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Ice Age giants
Elasmotherium
Unusually, despite its massive size and prominent shoulder hump, it is thought that the Siberian unicorn was actually adapted to running at speed.
'The rhino's anatomy suggested that it lived in pretty open, grassy plains, grazing almost entirely on grass,' explains Adrian. 'Its unusual teeth look very strongly for that kind of grazing too.'
By studying the stable isotope ratios in the rhino's teeth, which involves looking at the levels of different carbon and nitrogen isotopes and then comparing them to different plants, the researchers were able
Regarding how they behaved, however, researchers have to rely on living animals.
'Modern Rhinos tend to be rather lonely and spread out in their habitat,' says Adrian. 'Combined with Elasmotherium's restricted geographical range, it could have been quite a rare animal.'
The last unicorn
This natural scarcity may have been one of the factors that tipped the Siberian unicorn into extinction some 39,000 years ago, around the same time that Neanderthals went extinct and some time before cave bears and spotted hyenas were last seen in Europe.
This means that the animals would have been sharing Eurasia with both modern humans and Neanderthals, but as Adrian explains, it is unlikely that they were hunted into extinction.
'There is no evidence at all that people had anything to do with it. You can not rule it out, but we do not have any archaeological association of this animal with people in any way at any sites known so far, "he says.
'The environment where the animal was living seems to have changed quite considerably around the same time it went extinct,' explains Adrian, 'so it's quite plausible that if it was a rare animal to start then it would have been at a relatively high risk of extinction. '
The first DNA
Finally, Adrian's colleagues in Australia were able to extract DNA from some of the fossils, the first time any DNA has ever been recovered from E.
This has helped to settle a debate about where the Siberian Unicorn, along with all the other members of the Elastrotherium genus, fit on the rhino evolutionary tree.
It turns out that the ancient group split from the modern group of rhinos roughly 43 million years ago. This means that the Siberian unicorn was the last species of a very distinctive and ancient lineage when it was extinct on the Eurasian plains only a few decades ago.
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