How a change in climate wiped out the 'Siberian unicorn
How a change in climate wiped out the 'Siberian unicorn' An artist’s impression of Siberian unicorns ( Elasmotherium ) walking in the steppe grass on a cloudy day. Shutterstock/Elenarts Kieren Mitchell , University of Adelaide ; Adrian Lister , Natural History Museum ; Alan Cooper , University of Adelaide , and Chris Turney , UNSW A mysterious shaggy giant species of rhinoceros – named the Siberian unicorn due to its enormous single horn – turns out to have survived in western Russia until just 36,000 years ago, according to research published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution . This extinction date means that the Siberian unicorn’s final days were shared with early modern humans and Neanderthals. Previously, little was known about the creature thought to have become extinct more than 200,000 years ago. But genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating have begun to reveal many aspects of how it lived, and when it died out. A k...