Sasha: A baby woolly rhinoThe gently thawing Siberian permafrost is famous for its finds of well pre
Sasha: A baby woolly rhinoThe gently thawing Siberian permafrost is famous for its finds of well preserved frozen mammoths (seehttp://on.fb.me/1BthhWr andhttp://on.fb.me/1M0z7D2), but in 2014, the Sakha Republic saw the first discovery of a baby woollyl rhino eroding out of a riverbank. Sasha was named after the hunter who spotted her hair hanging out of the riverbank, spotted the horns sticking out of the jaw and alerted scientists at the Mammoth Fauna Department of the Yakutian Academy of Sciences. The sex of the animal isn’t actually known but the team studying the fossil say the name “Universally applies. Sasha’s age at death is estimated at 7 months making it far larger than modern rhinoceros at the same age, and chemical tests show that it is about 10,000 years old. Work on the frozen hair pigment further showed that Sasha was a “strawberry blonde”. So far only five specimens of well preserved adult woolly rhinos have been found throughout Europe and northern Asia, though fossil bones are more common. Sasha is the first ever juvenile, which will give researchers insights into their growth process and how it compares with that of their modern cousins. Much less is known about these large furry creatures that shared the ice age landscapes of Europe with our ancestors than their cousins the mammoths, though as the second photo (taken in Chauvet the oldest painted cave in France, dated to 32,000 years ago) reveals, our distant forebears certainly interacted with them.LozImage credit: Academy of Sciences, Republic of Sakhahttp://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0129-meet-sasha-the-worlds-only-baby-woolly-rhino/https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/sasha-woolly-rhino-mummy-siberia-ice-age-spd/ -- source link
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