14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers with Russia's Yakutian Academy of Sciences are now hard at work examining the skeletal remains of a young woolly rhino that lived in present-day Siberia about 10,000 years ago.
The corpse, shown in the photo below, was discovered by a hunter who chanced to stumble upon it while exploring the frozen banks of a local river. It was this hunter that donated the body to the Yakutian Academy of Sciences.
Live Science tells us that, when alive, the baby woolly rhino measured about 1.5 meters (nearly 5 feet) in length and stood 0.8 meters (roughly 2.5 feet) tall. Had it matured, it would have gotten a whole lot bigger.
Thus, researchers familiar with this long-extinct species say that the adult woolly rhinos that roamed Siberia millennia ago were an average 4.5 meters (15 feet) long and stood 2 meters (6 feet) tall at the shoulders.
The baby woolly rhino, nicknamed Sasha after the hunter who found it, is the youngest representative of its species to have until now been discovered anywhere in the world. Despite being 10,000 years old, the corpse is very well preserved.
In fact, it is in such good condition that specialists at the Yakutian Academy of Sciences say that, soon enough, they will try to extract be it only a few DNA samples from it.
In case anyone was wondering, woolly rhinos emerged as a species about 350,000 years back. Like other ancient creatures such as woolly mammoths, they went extinct when climate change transformed their natural habitat.
