Wooly rhino fossil found in Tibet predates Ice Age

Los Angeles: Searching across the Tibetan plateau, paleontologists have discovered a species of woolly rhinoceros that may be an ancestor of the great Ice Age beasts that roamed the icy plains of North America and Eurasia.

The Coelodonta thibetana fossil dates to about 3.7 million years ago, about a million years before other known woolly rhinos.

The findings, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, lead researchers to believe that before the Ice Age began, the chilly Tibetan highlands may have served as an evolutionary cradle for cold-hardy mammals whose descendants thrived in the glacial times that followed.

Paleontologists have yet to fully trace the origins of many of the giant, hairy beasts that lived during the most recent Ice Age, which lasted from about 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago. Many of these animals, whose massive bodies conserved heat effectively, were thought to have evolved in Eurasia from animals that managed to survive and adapt to an increasingly cold environment.

The new fossil from the Zanda Basin in Tibet may provide an alternative evolutionary explanation for some of those animals, said study co-author Xiaoming Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Wang's team did not go to the Tibetan highlands expecting to bag such a find. Tibet's elevated plains are relatively untouched paleontologically, and they were simply looking to learn about the history of its animal life.