Like modern rhinos, woolly rhinos likely also used their horns as weapons. Notches in the middle of some of the horns that have been discovered might have formed when they smacked against the horn of another rhino, according to Kahlke.
Scenes of these epic battles have been immortalized in a 30,000-year-old cave painting in France that shows two woolly rhinos clashing. Like many of their relatives, woolly rhinos also had a second, shorter horn closer to their head, which probably shielded their brain during these fights, Kahlke adds.
A frozen goldmine for Ice Age fauna
Woolly rhinos used to roam the mammoth steppe, a cold, dry grassland that stretched across Europe, Asia and Canada. They lived alongside cave lions, woolly mammoths and even humans until they went extinct around 14,000 years ago.
(Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all.)
In addition to woolly rhinos, Yakutia is a gold mine for Ice Age fauna. The region’s deep and extensive permafrost can preserve animals for tens of thousands of years, says Gennady Boeskorov, a paleontologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study.