Fossils of rhino taller than a giraffe found in China
Some 26.5 million years ago, a newfound giant rhino species roamed the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. Based on its skull anatomy, the rhino’s discoverers think it had a short, prehensile trunk like a modern tapir.
One of the largest land animals ever, the newfound species roamed between what is now the Tibetan Plateau and Pakistan more than 25 million years ago.
Today’s Tibetan Plateau reaches into the sky—a craggy expanse of high-altitude steppes butting up against the towering Himalaya. But 26.5 million years ago, parts of this region were dotted with humid woodlands, giving refuge to another kind of skyscraper: one of the biggest mammals to ever walk on land.
The newfound creature, unveiled today in the scientific journal Communications Biology, is an extinct cousin of today’s rhinoceros called Paraceratherium linxiaense. The colossal animal would have weighed up to 24 tons, four times heavier than today’s African elephants, and its skull alone was more than a yard long.
It’s the latest known species in a group of giant, hornless rhinos that lived across Central Asia from roughly 50 million years ago until 23 million years ago. P. linxiaense and its kin are all famous for their huge sizes. The average adult is thought to have stood more than 16 feet tall at the shoulder, with a nearly seven-foot-long neck topped by a massive skull. Today’s giraffes are between 14 and 19 feet tall, head and all.
The giant rhinos “would have been able to eat flowers at the third or fourth floor of a building,” says National Geographic Explorer Pierre-Olivier Antoine, a rhino paleontologist at France’s University of Montpellier who reviewed the new study.
P. linxiaense was among the last of these giants, called paraceratheres, living about 26.5 million years ago. Thanks to their age and location, the new fossils, including a complete skull, a mandible, and three vertebrae, are helping fill out the paracerathere family tree, shedding new light on where these towering rhinos evolved and how they spread across the present-day continent of Asia.
A prehistoric giant
Paraceratherium fossils are rare and often fragmentary, making it hard to chart the genus’s evolution and spread. The group’s longtime home appears to have been Central Asia, but the first species of Paraceratherium ever found, P. bugtiense, lived in what is now western Pakistan. How exactly did this giant rhino get all the way to the Indian subcontinent?
Researchers led by Tao Deng, a mammal paleontologist at China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, have now found that the new species P. linxiaense was closely related to the Pakistani P. bugtiense, and that hints at the Pakistani rhino’s origins.
The new fossils hail from the brown sandstones of central China’s Linxia Basin. Here, sediment layers up to 1.2 miles thick tell the story of the last 30 million years of Earth’s history, peppered with fossils from the ancient creatures that once lived in the region.
In the 1950s, farmers in the area claimed to have found “dragon bones.” For a time, these remains were sold to medical companies and used as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicines. By the 1980s, paleontologists recognized that the region preserved scientifically valuable fossils from the late Oligocene epoch, the time period 23 to 28 million years ago.
Ever since, paleontologists with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology have studied the Linxia Basin’s rocks and the rich array of fossils they contain.
In May 2015, Deng and his colleagues came across a rare find near the village of Wangjiachuan: the complete skull and mandible of a giant rhinoceros, as well as three vertebrae from another individual. When the researchers saw the 26.5 million-year-old bones—including the 3.8-foot-long skull—their preservation and size came as “a great surprise to us,” Deng says.
Based on its similarities to the giant rhino from Pakistan, the new findings suggest that giant rhinos moved freely across thousands of miles between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent between 30 and 35 million years ago. Tropical conditions at the time “allowed the giant rhino to return northward to Central Asia, implying that the Tibetan region was still not uplifted as a high-elevation plateau,” Deng writes in an email—an idea that is backed up by geologic evidence suggesting the area still had some low-lying parts until about 25 million years ago.
Mysteries of the giant rhino
Antoine, the French paleontologist, says the new study helps reveal geographic patterns that governed the giant rhinos’ movements across ancient Earth. A catalog of giant rhino fossils in the new research suggests that the animals never crossed from Asia into Europe through the Ural Mountains, for example, indicating the mountain range may have acted as a barrier.
The research may also help explain how the huge creatures arrived in what’s now Turkey, where fossils of the rhinos have also been found. According to Antoine, fossils that have not yet been described in a scientific paper suggest that after giant rhinos arrived in present-day Pakistan, they made their way into Turkey across what is now Afghanistan and Iran.
Some of the fossils that tell this story, however, are now lost to science. A collection of 300 fossils that Antoine helped collect in Pakistan—including giant rhino remains—was destroyed in 2006, when the Pakistani army bombed Dera Bugti, a town in the western Balochistan Province, as part of a long-simmering civil conflict.
That same year, the powerful chieftain and Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti died in an explosion during a standoff with the Pakistani military. Bugti had been a key contact, and source of protection, for paleontologists working in the region.
In P. linxiaense’s case, the fossils are secure in the Hezheng Paleozoological Museum in China’s north-central Gansu province. Deng has high hopes for future studies of the remains, including a reconstruction of the creature’s muscles and a more refined estimate of its body mass.
He adds that since researchers now have evidence of giant rhinos crossing the present-day Tibetan Plateau, there may be more fossils to find in the region—a skyscraper of an animal, interred in what is now the roof of the world.
See more here: nationalgeographic.com
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Mark Tapley
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All of these dinosaur remains are claimed to be many millions of years old. How do the paleontologists explain the recent findings by separate groups of T Rex and other specimens that still had remains of blood vessels, ligaments and cartilage? Could not have been anywhere near that old. The evolutionists never mention that dinosaur and human footprints have been discovered in the same formation. Something catastrophic had to happen to preserve these animals. In natural conditions the carcass would be eaten or decomposed as happened to the millions of buffalo killed in the gov. program in the U.S. Not one was fossilized.
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Andy
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I’ve never heard anyone say human and dino footprints have been found together.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Andy,
I believe it is Californias where a dried stream bed, that has turned to stone, has both dinosaur and human footprints.
Herb
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Chris*
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So many questions ; How does a 24 ton animal get up and down? A six ton elephant has a second set of knees .How does it have sex? Presuming it is a herbivore , does it digest its own gut bacteria for protein ? Who are it’s predators? Giraffes have structures in their necks to maintain blood pressure and prevent them getting light headed and dizzy when they put their heads up and down, these animals are even taller ! Paleontologists throw out figures and statements for the shock and awe effect without ever thinking about the biomechanics of the animals life.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Chris, Guys and hopefully PSI Readers,
I would like to address this comment to Michael Greshko, writer for National Geographic, for he is just as responsible for its SCIENCE as the Scientists who wrote the SCIENTIFIC article which is the topic of his article. However, I doubt Michael would ever read my comment here at PSI.
Look at header image focusing only upon the heads of the two ‘animals’. I judge the two heads are about the same size.
Michael wrote: “The colossal animal would have weighed up to 24 tons, four times heavier than today’s African elephants, and its skull alone was more than a yard long.
“It’s the latest known species in a group of giant, hornless rhinos that lived across Central Asia from roughly 50 million years ago until 23 million years ago. P. linxiaense and its kin are all famous for their huge sizes. The average adult is thought to have stood more than 16 feet tall at the shoulder, with a nearly seven-foot-long neck topped by a massive skull. Today’s giraffes are between 14 and 19 feet tall, head and all.”
“African elephants are the largest land animals in the world today. The largest African elephant ever recorded was found in Angola, rocking in at a massive 24,000 lb (11,000 kg), with a shoulder height of 3.96 meters (13.0 ft), and being at least a metre taller than the average male African elephant!”
(https://www.elephantsforafrica.org › elephant-facts)
No skull length but I find a skull length (35.4in) for an African Elephant Skull Replica. (https://www.dinosaursrocksuperstore.com/products/african-elephant-skull)
This information only supports what I judge by sight about the two heads and this not why I write this comment. Some of you question the proposed huge size this animals body only based upon its skulls size.
In ‘Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences’ (1638) as translated to English by Crew and de Salvio) I read on the first page (remembering that Galileo wrote every word of his book): “And notwithstanding the fact that what the old man told us a little while ago is proverbial and commonly accepted, yet it seemed to me altogether false, like many another saying which is current among the ignorant; for I think they introduce these expressions in order to give the appearance of knowing something about matters which they do not understand,
“You refer, perhaps, to that last remark of his when we asked the reason they employed stocks, scaffolding and bracing of larger dimensions for launching a big vessel than they do for a small one; and he answered that they did this birder to avoid the danger of the ship parting under its own heavy weight [vasta mole], a danger to which small boats are not subject.”
On the Second Day (page 130 in my book) comes directly back to the weight of a body part apart a large body. “From what has already been demonstrated, you can plainly see the impossibility of increasing the size of structures to vast dimensions either in art or in nature; likewise the impossibility of building ships, palaces, or temples of enormous size in such a way that their oars, yards, beams, iron-bolts, and, in short, all their other parts will hold together; nor can nature produce trees of extraordinary size because the branches would break down under their own weight; so also it would be impossible to build up the bony structures of men, horses, or other animals so as to hold together and perform their normal functions … .” Galileo continued for another page or two but I conclude that Chris sees “Paleontologists throw out figures and statements for the shock and awe effect without ever thinking about the biomechanics of the animals life.” exactly what Galileo saw and wrote in 1638. “for I think they introduce these expressions in order to give the appearance of knowing something about matters which they do not understand.”
Good going Chris!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
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Andy
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Without ever thinking about the biomechanics? Seriously? That is tantamount to saying they are inept.
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