Was the disappeared ice field "giant horned monster" already picked up by a prehistoric cave "artist"?

In December 1994, French explorer Jean-Marin Chauvet and two companions discovered a huge cave in the Ardèche Canyon in southwestern France. Behind a collapsed rock, the three dug a narrow entrance and crawled in. They shouted loudly, trying to measure the cave by echo, but the sound disappeared in the darkness. The three were delighted that they might have discovered the largest cave in the area, but they did not expect that a bigger surprise was yet to come.

When they had packed up their equipment and entered the cave again, they discovered a bear painted with ochre on the cave wall. In subsequent explorations, they discovered thousands of animal rock paintings. The smoothness of the lines and the exquisiteness of the techniques shocked everyone who saw them. These were later considered to be mankind's earliest, most outstanding and most historically significant prehistoric paintings - the Chauvet Rock Paintings.

There are as many as 14 kinds of animals depicted in the rock paintings, including not only mammoths, but also a prehistoric rhinoceros with abnormally large front horns - the woolly rhinoceros.

The woolly rhinoceros lived from the late Pliocene to the late Pleistocene and belonged to the genus Coelodonta of the family Rhinoceros. Its Latin name Coelodonta means hollow teeth (i.e. cavity teeth). This is because they have no incisors, but their molars are hollow inside, with high crowns and many wrinkles.

Because the woolly rhinoceros lived in the northern part of Eurasia, on a vast continent, the repeated expansion and recession of the ice sheet left the lower soil in a permafrost state, and low plants grew sparsely. Such teeth were very suitable for chewing these low and dry plants.

To process these cellulose-rich and low-nutrition foods, woolly rhinos have a unique digestive system - hindgut fermentation, which allows them to obtain all the nutrients in the food and generate a small amount of heat from the body to warm the body.

This method of digestion is very effective. Not only can they obtain the nutrients they need to survive, they even grow a "hump" on their backs to store fat in spring and summer and survive the harsh winter.

Another magic weapon for surviving the harsh winter is the thick fur covering their entire body, which is not only the reason why they are called woolly rhinos, but also an important line of defense for them to resist the cold. In addition, the short legs that are abnormally disproportionate to their body size also reduce the exposure of body parts to cold air.

Another unusually obvious feature of rhinoceros is their two huge horns. The front horn is called the nose horn, which can be up to 1 meter long, and the back horn is called the frontal horn, which is only about one-third the length of the nose horn. The huge horns can be used to show off to the opposite sex, and they are also practical for shoveling snow and eating grass. However, rhino horns, like hair, are made of keratin, so compared with mammoth ivory, fewer have been preserved.

About 10,000 years ago, the woolly rhinoceros became extinct. The reason was related to hunting by humans, which is also depicted in the Chauvet rock paintings, but the inability to adapt to environmental changes was also an important reason: at the end of the Pleistocene, the woolly rhinoceros first appeared in Central Asia, which coincided with the retreat of glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere and the gradual change of the environment from cold grassland to warm and humid tundra. Changes in climate and vegetation led to the gradual demise of large herbivorous mammals such as the woolly rhinoceros.

The extinction of the woolly rhino is irreversible, but rhinoceros still share the same planet with us. We should pay more attention to their current living conditions rather than lamenting the disappearance of species.