June 25, 2010
Rhinoceroses in Romania
A rhinoceros drawn on the wall of a cave in Romania (Credit: Andrei Posmosanu/Romanian Federation of Speleology)
In modern times, rhinos are exotic creatures that inhabit faraway lands in Asia and Africa. There are only five living species; all but one is threatened with extinction. But rhinoceroses are an old lineage. They have been around for 50 million years or so, and they once roamed areas in North America and Europe, in temperate and even arctic regions (there was even a woolly rhino).
Some species in Europe survived past the end of the last Ice Age and didn’t become extinct until around 10,000 years ago. That made them perfect subjects for long ago cave artists, like the one who made the drawing above, which was found last year in a cave, Coliboaia, in northwestern Romania. Much of the cave is underwater, which explains why the drawings were only found recently though the cave itself was discovered 30 years ago. Spelunkers exploring the cave found about half a dozen images of animals, including two rhinos, a bison and a horse. There may have been other paintings but they were likely destroyed by the water that now fills the cave.
Jean Clottes, a cave art expert from France (where the most famous cave art can be found, in Lascaux), has estimated that the drawings are around 23,000 and 35,000 years old, based on their style and similarities to other prehistoric art. Radiocarbon dating of the drawings or nearby bear bones may provide a more accurate estimate of when these ancient artists lived.
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Who needs Jurassic Park? We often laugh at those old movies showing cavemen fighting off dinosaurs, which went extinct tens of millions of years before man showed up on the scene. But the real Pleistocene megafauna our ancestors dealt with were no less ferocious. I’d love to see a film accurately depict gomphotheres, ground sloths, mammoths, and saber-tooth tigers.
“Based on their style”
I would like to know more about this. Discussions of artistic style bring to mind the various “schools” of, say, Renaissance Art, but that implies wide-spread communication which, I dare say, did not exist in prehistoric times.
Doesn’t this look to be a Mammoth instead??
looks like a aardvark to me.
[...] A team of geologists and paleontologists found a complete skull and lower jaw of a new species of woolly rhinoceros, which they named Coelodonta thibetana, in the high-altitude Zanda Basin at the foothills of the Himalayas in southwestern Tibet. The fossil dates to about 3.7 million years ago, the middle Pliocene. The scientists posit that the woolly rhino evolved there in the cold, high-elevation conditions of Tibet and when the Ice Age began, 2.6 million years ago, it descended from its mountainous home and spread throughout northern Asia and Europe. [...]