Giants roamed in our backyard

Colossal footprints

Scientists have discovered fossils of a primitive woolly rhino in the Himalayan foothills suggesting evolution of some of the world’s giant mammals in Tibet before the beginning of the Ice Age 2.8 million years ago.

The extinction of Ice Age giants such as woolly mammoths and rhinos, giant sloths, and saber-tooth cats has been widely studied.  However, not much is known about where these giants came from, and how they acquired their adaptations for living in a cold environment.

The new rhino is 3.6 million years old (middle Pliocene age), older and more primitive than the Pleistocene Ice Age (2,588,000 to 11700 years ago)) descendants in Europe and Asia. The scientists found a complete skull, jaw with the atlas and vertebral bones in the Zanda basin of southwestern Tibet Plateau in the foothills of the Himalayas in 2007. The analysis took almost four years.

The extinct animal had developed special adaptations for sweeping snow using its flattened horn to reveal vegetation, a useful behaviour for survival in the harsh Tibetan climate, the team reported in the journal Science on Friday.

“As far as being a place for the origin of the megafauna, Tibet may be the place. We found good evidence for the woolly rhino, bharal, chiru, and snow leopard, but there are lots of other elements of Ice Age mega-fauna that may or may not have anything to do with Tibet. Besides Tibet, there isn’t a particular place where Ice Age mammals were evolved in large numbers,” lead author of the study Xiaoming Wang, curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles told Deccan Herald. The team also found fossils of other animals like Bharal, Chiru, Snow leopard, which would be published later. “All of the fossils for these three animals belong to the ancestral form of their modern counterpart,” he said.

“The find is of great interest to those working on fossils including those who found rhinos from the Ladakh region of India,” said Indian fossil hunter Sunil Bajpai from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee who is not connected with the Science study.

Way back on 1999, paleontologists led by B N Tiwari at Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun found the rhino fossil at an altitude of 18000 ft. Tiwari left for USA on Friday to further study his rhino fossil in the light of the new discovery.