32,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros found preserved in Russian permafrost

(CNN) – Scientists have discovered a woolly rhinoceros It has been well preserved in the Russian permafrost for over 32,000 years, with its skin and fur still intact.

This woolly rhinoceros died when he was about four years old, and that age, combined with the good state of preservation, has allowed scientists to learn more about the now extinct species.

“The vast majority of Ice Age animal remains are bones and teeth, without flesh or skin or anything like that,” Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University who was not involved in the study, told CNN. He has studied the remains of other animals found in the Siberian permafrost.

“It’s probably one in 10,000 or so where you come across something like this (a rhinoceros). However, there are a lot of specimens that come out of the permafrost every year, so it seems like this happens almost every year.

The results of this study, detailed in a research paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences, revealed that the woolly rhinoceros had a large hump of fat on its back and that its fur changed color as it aged.

When this woolly rhinoceros roamed eastern Siberia more than 30,000 years ago, it would have been “one of the largest herbivores in the Ice Age ecosystem, second only to the woolly mammoth,” grazing the grasslands there, Dalen said.

The woolly rhinoceros, like its modern counterparts, had two horns, but one of them was “a very large, blade-shaped horn, which is quite unique,” compared to the round horns of modern rhinoceroses, he added.

Once dead, this woolly rhinoceros remained frozen in the permafrost until a team of Russian scientists from research institutions in Yakutsk and Moscow discovered it in August 2020 on the banks of the Terkhtyakh River.

The study doesn’t detail how the remains were found, but in that region of Siberia, Dalen explained, local Russians are digging tunnels into the permafrost in search of mammoth tusks to sell. As part of an agreement with local authorities in the area where the woolly rhino was found, the tusk hunters have to contact paleontologists whenever they discover something interesting, like a mummified woolly rhino, meaning there’s a steady stream of well-preserved specimens from this particular region.

When the animal was discovered, scientists temporarily thawed it before taking samples of fur, skin and hump for testing. While the rhinoceros’ right side remained well preserved in the permafrost, its left side was so badly deteriorated that scientists concluded it had been eaten by predators. Its internal organs were exposed and most of its intestines were missing, the study noted.

On its back, scientists noticed a hump up to 13 centimeters long filled with a fat mass. This is a relatively common trait among Arctic animals, Dalen said, and provides a way to store energy for the winter and convert food energy into heat without shivering like humans.

By comparing this specimen, which had light brown fur and a lighter, softer undercoat, with other specimens of different ages, the researchers concluded that young woolly rhinos had light, even blond hair, which later became darker and coarser as they reached maturity.

Such samples are important for future research, Dalen said, because there are types of genetic testing that can only be done on tissue, not bone.