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ice age

PALEONTOLOGY: There Was An (Ugly) Ice-Age Unicorn

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Ice Age Unicorn

A burly “unicorn” that once plodded over grasslands in Siberia was around for much longer than once thought — long enough to have roamed the land at the same time as modern humans. This one-horned native of the steppes, Elasmotherium sibiricum, was a hefty, furry beast in the rhino family that weighed nearly 4 tons — more than twice the weight of a white rhinoceros, the largest species of modern rhino. Previous interpretations of E. sibiricum bones suggested that they died out 200,000 years ago, but recent analysis hints that E. sibricum fossils are much younger than that, dating to … Read more

SCIENCE: Can We Revive an Ice-Age Horse?

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ice age horse

A team of scientists in Siberia is hopeful that a mummified 40,000-year-old baby horse can provide critical genetic material for cloning the extinct ice-age species. But experts told Live Science that they are skeptical that the scientists will be able to find viable DNA on the body at all, let alone overcome the enormous challenges of cloning a species that’s been extinct for millennia. Revived after millennia? The preserved foal’s body was discovered in August and was excavated from melting permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, a region in eastern Russia. Researchers working with the frozen remains recently told … Read more