Ice Age 'Unicorn' May Have Lived Alongside Modern Humans

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | December 1, 2018 08:48am ET

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 at least 39,000 years ago and possibly as recently as 35,000 years ago, according to a new study. This would mean that the "unicorn" was still around when people populated the region, the scientists reported. [10 Extinct Giants That Once Roamed North America] 

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Utah Landscapers Discover Remains of Ice Age Horse

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | May 7, 2018 06:34am ET

During the last ice age, a small horse about the size of a Shetland pony somehow trampled into a big lake. It's unclear how the animal died, but its body fell to the bottom of the lake, where it lay buried for about 16,000 years — that is, until this past fall, when landscapers in Utah unexpectedly unearthed the horse's remains in their backyard.

The discovery is a rare one. Horses lived in North America from about 50 million to 11,000 years ago, when they went extinct on the continent before being reintroduced by the Europeans thousands of years later, but it's uncommon to find horse remains in Utah, a state that was partly covered by the prehistoric Lake Bonneville. (This ancient lake has since dwindled, forming several smaller lakes, including the Great Salt Lake.)

It's impossible to know how the horse died, but Rick Hunter, a paleontologist at the Museum of Ancient Life, in Lehi, Utah, who is studying the horse's remains, has several ideas. Perhaps the horse made its way into the lake and then drowned while trying to escape from an ice age predator, such as a short-faced bear or saber-toothed cat, he said. Or maybe the horse died in a stream whose waters emptied into the lake. [10 Extinct Giants That Once Roamed North America]

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DNA Solves 200-Year-Old Mystery of Weird Ice Age Creature

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | June 27, 2017 01:05pm ET

An odd extinct mammal that lived in South America during the last ice age had a long neck like a llama's, three-toed feet like a rhino's and what may have been a tapir-like trunk. This peculiar combination of traits fueled a mystery lasting nearly two centuries about how to classify the bizarre beast.

The Macrauchenia genus has puzzled scientists since Charles Darwin discovered limb bones and vertebrae fossils "of some very large animal" in Patagonia and fancied it to be a mastodon, as he wrote in a letter to his mentor, the naturalist John Stevens Henslow, in March 1834. Upon analyzing Darwin's finds, the scientist Sir Richard Owen declared in a species description published in 1838 that the creature resembled a camel, but uncertainty remained about where Macrauchenia fit on the mammal family tree.

The recent discovery of a rare DNA sample from the unusual species provided a crucial missing piece: genetic evidence confirming Macrauchenia lineage and its closest relatives, scientists reported in a new study. 

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Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia

Date: January 26, 2017

Source: Vanderbilt University


During the last Ice Age, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass, called Sahul. It was a strange and often hostile place populated by a bizarre cast of giant animals.

There were 500-pound kangaroos, marsupial tapirs the size of horses and wombat-like creatures the size of hippos. There were flightless birds that weighed twice as much as modern emu, 33-foot snakes, 20-foot crocodiles, 8-foot turtles with horned heads and spiked tails, and giant monitor lizards that measured greater than 6 feet from tip to tail and were likely venomous.

By about 30,000 years ago, however, most of these 'megafauna' had disappeared from the Sahul as part of a global mass extinction that saw the end of nearly all of the super-sized animals that had evolved to survive in extreme Ice Age climates. The factors that forced the Australian megafauna into extinction remain a matter of considerable controversy. Many experts argue that the ancestors of the Australian aborigines, who made an appearance approximately 50,000 years ago, either hunted them into extinction or gradually destroyed the habitat they required by practices such as fire-stick burning. Others argue that the gradual drying out of Australia and weakening of the Australian monsoon played a major role in their demise.

A new study has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.



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Mystery beast in ice age cave art revealed as cow-bison hybrid

18 October 2016

By Alice Klein

Cow, bison or both? DNA fingerprinting has revealed that a strange bovine creature painted by European cave artists during the ice age was a cross between a cow ancestor and bison.

Ancient European paintings depict two types of bison: one with long horns, a large hump and robust forequarters, and the other with short horns and a small hump. The former is more common in cave art painted more than 22,000 years ago, while the latter emerges about 17,000 years ago.

But DNA sequencing of bones and teeth from 64 ancient bison has revealed that there was another species in the mix. Over 120,000 years ago, interbreeding between steppe bison and aurochs – the now-extinct ancestors of modern cattle – created a hybrid animal.

The finding explains why the two bison forms appear in ancient paintings, and why bison bones uncovered from the ice age are not uniform in size and morphology.

It also helps to solve the long-running mystery of where modern European bison – or wisent – come from. These animals are genetically distinct from American bison, which are descended from steppe bison.

Julien Soubrier at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues analysed ancient bison DNA to show that European bison are descended from the hybrid bison. Analysing the DNA of modern animals was not sufficient to understand this process because they went through a genetic bottleneck of only 12 individuals in the 1920s, due to decline in habitat and hunting.

Cave art and fossil dating suggest that the short-horned hybrid bison and long-horned steppe bison swapped dominance multiple times from at least 55,000 years ago.

This was most likely a response to major environmental shifts, says Soubrier. “We know there were dramatic changes in temperature occurring every few thousand years in the late Pleistocene,” he says. “It’s possible that when it became colder, the steppe bison migrated elsewhere, while the hybrid found a niche and stayed.”

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Bison fossils shed light on human migration in the Ice Age

JUNE 7, 2016

by John Hopton

Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of bison fossils has revealed that an ice-free corridor along the Rocky Mountains was fully open by around 13,000 years ago, during the late Pleistocene.

Geological studies in the 1970s led to the corridor being posited as a route for the colonization of the Americas by humans moving south from Alaska. But the new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the pathway was not the one taken during the initial migration.

It was, however, a likely route for later dispersal of people and animals.

"The opening of the corridor provided new opportunities for migration and the exchange of ideas between people living north and south of the ice sheets," said first author Peter Heintzman, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz who led the DNA analysis. (We like to think the bison were sharing ideas, too).

The most up-to-date thinking on the subject is that the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets coalesced at the height of the last ice age, around 21,000 years ago, and closed the corridor much earlier than any evidence of humans south of the ice sheets. A Pacific coastal route is the more likely candidate for the first movement southwards, around 15,000 years ago.

In fact, according to Study coauthor Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, archaeological evidence suggests that the predominant human migration within the Rocky Mountains corridor was from south to north.

"When the corridor opened, people were already living south of there. And because those people were bison hunters, we can assume they would have followed the bison as they moved north into the corridor," Shapiro said.

Southern bison to start moving northward as early as 13,400 years ago, as the south began to open first, before the corridor fully opened and the two populations overlapped by 13,000 years ago after northern bison had also started to move southward.

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Bee populations expanded during global warming after the last Ice Age

Date: May 31, 2016

Source: Pensoft Publishers

The Australian small carpenter bee populations appear to have dramatically flourished in the period of global warming following the last Ice Age some 18,000 years ago.

The bee species is found in sub-tropical, coastal and desert areas from the north-east to the south of Australia. Researchers Rebecca Dew and Michael Schwarz from the Flinders University of South Australia teamed up with Sandra Rehan, the University of New Hampshire, USA, to model its past responses to climate change with the help of DNA sequences. Their findings are published in the open accessJournal of Hymenoptera Research.

"You see a rapid increase in population size from about 18,000 years ago, just as the climate began warming up after the last Ice Age," says lead author Rebecca Dew. "This matches the findings from two previous studies on bees from North America and Fiji."

"It is really interesting that you see very similar patterns in bees around the world," adds Rebecca. "Different climate, different environment, but the bees have responded in the same way at around the same time."

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12,000 year old Ice Age puppies could be first evidence of domesticated dogs

MARCH 28, 2016

by Brett Smith

Researchers working in northeast Russia were recently able to recover the fully-intact remains of two puppies that sat preserved in ice for 12,460 years.

According to a report from the Agence-France Presse, the puppies could shed light in the history of dog domestication as they may have been owned by local cavemen.

"To find a carnivorous mammal intact with skin, fur and internal organs -- this has never happened before in history," Sergei Fyodorov, head of exhibitions at the Mammoth Museum of the North-Eastern Federal University, told the AFP.

Finding prehistoric puppies

When the hunters came across the first frozen puppy in 2011, they alerted Fyodorov who quickly flew over to the distant Russian Arctic region of Yakutia, located approximately 2,900 miles from Moscow.

Last year, he returned for a more comprehensive examination and discovered the second puppy near the same spot. Both dogs passed away when they were approximately three months old and they probably come from the same litter, Fyodorov said.

Last week, the Russian scientist oversaw the removing of the second puppy's amazingly well-preserved brain.

"Puppies are very rare, because they have thin bones and delicate skulls," he said.

Fyodorov said an initial check of mammoth remains also discovered at the dig indicated some had been butchered and burned, a sign of humans. However, the scientists said they weren't sure if the puppies were domesticated or wild. Sequencing the genomes, which will take a year, should reveal the answer.

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