From the frozen lands of Siberiaa young woolly rhino has returned to the light, preserved for over 32,000 years in permafrost. Skin, fur and even some internal organs are still there, intact, as if time had stopped. A discovery that makes scientists’ eyes shine, offering a precious window into a species that, millions of years ago, dominated the scene together with mammoths during the last ice age.
Valerii Plotnikova paleontologist involved in the study, described the emotion of touching a piece of history:
It’s mesmerizing. The feeling of touching something that lived thousands of years ago is indescribable.
Discovered in 2020 along the banks of the Tirekhtyakh River, in a remote region of eastern Russia, this young specimen, dubbed the “Abyisky rhinoceros”, was about four years old at the time of his death. Thanks to the perpetual frost, his body has been preserved in an incredible way. Although scientists have found fossils of Ice Age animals before, discovering remains with such well-preserved soft tissue is a rarity. Love Dalénprofessor of evolutionary genomics, explains it like this:
Such a discovery happens once in ten thousand.
A glacial adaptation
The biggest surprise? A hump of fat still visible on his back, never before seen in a woolly rhino. Arctic animals used these energy reserves to cope with long winters. Adrian Listerpaleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London, adds:
We knew that woolly rhinos had big shoulders, but physically seeing the fat there is an amazing discovery.
The rhino is not just a miracle of conservation, but a natural archive. In its hairs, scientists have found tiny crustaceans, now disappeared from the region, which tell the story of the evolution of ecosystems over millennia. This animal was not a loner: it shared its habitat with giants such as the mammoth, even if the two species occupied different territories. While mammoths migrated to North America, woolly rhinos remained in Eurasia, a mystery that still fascinates scholars.
The idea of finding his intact stomach excites paleontologists: it could reveal crucial details about his diet and environment at the time. But with global warming melting more and more permafrost, these prehistoric treasures are at risk of decomposing once exposed. The discovery of the Abyisky rhino is a race against time, but for now it offers us a fascinating and extraordinary vision of a vanished world, that of the Ice Age.
