The fluffy white Samoyed could barely contain its excitement as a pristine cake shaped like the pup itself was placed in front of it. But before the birthday dog even had the chance to take a bite, a greedy golden retriever suddenly swooped in and snatched the entire cake in its mouth. Source link
The woolly rhino, Coelodonta antiquitatis, would have been an impressive sight to the ancient people who painted images of them on cave walls and carved figurines of them out of bone, antler, ivory and wood. The sadly now extinct rhino lived on the steppes and tundra of Europe and Asia, living alongside people for thousands of years. And a new study of woolly rhino DNA, extracted from the stomach of a wolf challenges a long held belief about species at risk of extinction. The species, which evolved in the middle of the Pleistocene era, approximately half a million years ago, weighed up to three tonnes. It was similar in size to the two largest rhino species alive today, the white rhino of southern and eastern Africa and the one-horned rhino of India. The woolly rhino was well adapted to live in ice age conditions. It had a thick layer of fat below the skin, a warm, woolly fleece and small ears and tail to minimise heat loss. It also had a shoulder hump to store …
The woolly rhino was one of the icons of the last glacial period The History Collection / Alamy A genome reconstructed from a tiny piece of flesh found in the stomach of a wolf pup that died 14,400 years ago suggests that woolly rhinos were still genetically healthy even as they faced imminent extinction. No one will ever know how a young female wolf pup died at a site near what is now the town of Tumat in northern Siberia, Russia. But it is most likely that she and her sister, together known as the Tumat Puppies, had just been fed the meat of a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) by their mother when their den collapsed, entombing the siblings in permafrost for 14,400 years. The first of the puppies was found at the site in 2011 and the second in 2015. A dissection of the stomach contents of one of the puppies yielded a piece of woolly rhinoceros flesh. Edana Lord at Stockholm University in Sweden, a member of the team that studied the fragment, …
