The story
In 2011 Tao Deng and colleagues described a skull and jaw of a rhinoceros from the Zanda Basin in southwestern Tibet. It is about 3.7 million years old, from the Pliocene, and belongs to the genus Coelodonta, whose later member, Coelodonta antiquitatis, is the woolly rhinoceros of the Ice Age. The Tibetan animal, Coelodonta thibetana, had a flattened horn, perhaps used to sweep snow from plants, and it lived at high altitude in cold, open country.
The Tibetan Plateau, raised by the collision of India with Asia, was already cold and high in the Pliocene, before the northern ice ages began. The authors proposed the 'Out of Tibet' hypothesis: cold-adapted giants such as the woolly rhino, and other animals such as the snow leopard and Tibetan blue sheep, may have evolved on the plateau and then spread to the lowlands as the ice ages made northern Eurasia cold. By about 400,000 years ago the woolly rhino lived across northern Eurasia, eating grass on the mammoth steppe, and it died out around 14,000 years ago. A well-known carcass was found in 1929 preserved in oil-soaked ground at Starunia, in Ukraine.
Why it mattered
- The fossil suggests cold-adapted ice age mammals evolved before the ice ages, on the Tibetan Plateau.
- It shows the uplift of Tibet as a source of new habitats and species.
- It adds to the evidence that high plateaus can act as evolutionary training grounds.
Sources
- Out of Tibet: Pliocene woolly rhino suggests high-plateau origin of ice age megaherbivores Science (via Northern Arizona University)
- Tibetan Plateau may have been cold cradle for ice age giants AAAS
- Woolly Rhino May Have Been A Tibetan Native Smithsonian Magazine
- The Starunia collections in the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków Geotourism (AGH University)
- When the woolly rhinoceroses roamed East Asia: a review of isotopic paleoecology of the genus Coelodonta from the Tibetan Plateau to northern Eurasia Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Contested history
Consensus: A 3.7 million year old woolly rhino relative lived in Tibet, but whether the plateau was the main cradle of ice age fauna is debated.
- Out of Tibet: Pliocene woolly rhino suggests high-plateau origin of ice age megaherbivores Science (via Northern Arizona University)
- Tibetan Plateau may have been cold cradle for ice age giants AAAS
- When the woolly rhinoceroses roamed East Asia: a review of isotopic paleoecology of the genus Coelodonta from the Tibetan Plateau to northern Eurasia Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
- Origin and causes of the mammoth steppe: a story of cloud cover, woolly mammal tooth pits, buckles, and inside-out Beringia Quaternary Science Reviews (R. Dale Guthrie, 2001)
- Out of Tibet: Pliocene woolly rhino suggests high-plateau origin of ice age megaherbivores Science (via Northern Arizona University)
- When the woolly rhinoceroses roamed East Asia: a review of isotopic paleoecology of the genus Coelodonta from the Tibetan Plateau to northern Eurasia Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
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