Chapter 1: Sir Henry H. Howorth
Sir Henry H. Howorth was President of the Royal Archaeological Institute in Great Britain, at the end of the 19th century. He has also studied the woolly mammoth of the Far North, how it lived, how it perished. He reports about his findings:
"Long ago, when I was a mere boy, I was corresponding with Darwin on a subject which had always interested me, namely how to account for the carcases of mammoths and other beasts preserved whole, in the frozen ground of Siberia; for the vast hecatombs of buried skeletons and bones of his contemporaries in different parts of the world. Darwin, like many others, who have looked the problem face to face, confessed to me that it remained to him the one stupendous mystery in the later geological history of the world, for which no rational explanation had been forthcoming." (1905:X, IX).
And in his book The Mammoth and the Flood (1887), Henry H. Howorth stated: "There is perhaps no inquiry in the whole range of Natural History more fascinating and romantic than that which deals with the Mammoth and its surroundings. Even children and unsophisticated people have their imagination stirred when they read how in the dreary and inhospitable wastes of Northern Siberia, where neither tree nor shrub will grow, where the land for hundreds of miles is covered with damp moss barely sprinkled for two months with a few gay flowers, and during the rest of the year is locked in ice and snow, and where only the hardiest of polar animals, the white fox and the polar hare, the raven and the snowy owl, can live, there are found below the ground huge hoards of bones of elephants and other great beasts whose appetite needed corresponding supplies of food. But our interest rises to the highest pitch, when we are told that this vast cemetery not only teems with fresh bones and beautiful tusks of ivory, but with the carcases and mummies of these great animals so well preserved in the perpetually frozen soil that the bears and wolves can feed upon them."
Then, Sir Henry H. Howorth asks: "Is it possible that these great animals could have lived under the conditions now prevailing in the tundras? I think I may say without hesitation that no inquirer, no student of this question, who has either himself been in Siberia, or who knows what the conditions of the Northern Siberian climate are, has ever answered this question affirmatively. Pallas, Middendorff, Baer, Brandt, Schmidt, Schrenck, &c. are all agreed that the vast herds of mammoths and the associated animals could not have lived in Northern Siberia under its present conditions." (1887:57, 58).
"It needs but a very cursory examination of a physical map of Asia to show this. If we draw an isotherm marking the present southern limit in Siberia, where the ground is permanently frozen all the year round at two or three feet below the surface, we shall find it to include not only all the district in which Mammoths’s bodies have been found more or less intact, but all the chief deposits of their bones, and if we inquire what kind of climate there is within this zone, we shall not hesitate very long in our answer. Travellers are agreed that the ground is perpetually frozen from two to three feet below the surface in all the country, and we are told that Yakuts merely dig holes in the frozen ground as meat-safes.
"At Dudinsk, on the Lower Yenissei, Schmidt says vegetation does not begin to appear till the 16th of June, when the catkins of the willow, and some green leaves begin to thrust upwards through the snow. On the Yenissei islands and the tundra he noticed no green till July, when the Salix lanata appeared, followed by Nardosima frigida and Chrysosplenium alternifolium. On the tundra in the neighbourhood of the Jyda, the summer lasted from the 13th of July to the 5th of August. Even during this interval, he says in another place, there were constant north winds and frosts at night, whilst the land was covered with snow on the 28th of June, through which the young shoots were appearing.
"At the other end of Siberia, we find Billings describing the Chukchi land as consisting of bare valleys and naked hills with no vegetation, except a scanty grey moss that springs from among the stones, and serves as food for the reindeer. Only in a few valleys did he observe a few stunted sand willows. The climate, he says, is the most melancholy that can be conceived; before the 20th of June there is no symptom of summer, and on the 20th of August the winter sets in again.
"Speaking of the district of the Lower Kolyma, Wrangell says: ‘The vegetation of summer is scarcely more than a struggle for existence. In the latter end of May the stunted willow bushes put out little wrinkled leaves, and those banks which slope towards the south become clothed with a serene verdant hue. In June, the temperature at noon attains 72° (F = 22°C); the flowers show themselves, and the berry-bearing plants blossom, when sometimes an icy blast from the sea turns the verdure yellow, and destroys the bloom... Winter socalled prevails during nine months of the year. In October the cold is somewhat mitigated by thick fogs and by the vapour rising from the freezing sea; but in November the great cold begins, and in January increases to –65° (F = -53.9°C). Then breathing becomes difficult; the wild reindeer, that citizen of the Polar regions, withdraws to the deepest thicket of the forest, and stands there motionless as if deprived of life. ... As the sun returns, the cold becomes even more sensible, and the intensity of the frost which accompanies the rising of the sun in February and March is especially penetrating.’" - Howorth, H.H. (1887:57-59).
Could herds of elephants have lived in North Siberia in such a climate, on such a plant-cover?
Henry H. Howorth concludes: "The larger portion of North Siberia is now naked tundra, on which no tree will grow; swept by terrible icy winds, and covered with moss, sprinkled with a few humble flowers. On such feeding-ground it is physically impossible, as has been well said, that elephants and rhinoceroses could exist. They cannot graze close to the ground like oxen. They live on the foliage and small branches of trees, and on juicy canes and long grasses (which grow shoulder-high in the jungles and the beds of African rivers), and would starve on one of our Craven pastures where the grass is close. This even in summer, but how in winter, which practically lasts for ten months in the year, when the tundra is covered deep with snow, and the terrible north wind sweeps across and makes it impossible for any but a very few singularly constituted animals, such as the raven and the snowy owl, the Polar fox, and the white bear, &c., to survive?
"If we turn from the tundras to the rivers which thread them, we shall find that the limit of trees certainly goes further north in the river valleys, but only a comparatively short distance, and near the mouths of the Lena, the Obi, and the Yenissei, where such multitudes of Mammoths’ remains have been found, there are no trees and no shrubs, but a bare waste; for the greater part of the year covered with snow, while the rivers themselves are for many months frozen hard to a depth of several feet, and everything is mantled with thick snow.
"When we frankly face these facts, we are constrained to admit with Lyell ‘that it would be impossible for herds of mammoths and rhinoceroses to subsist at present throughout the year, even in southern parts of Siberia, covered as it is with snow during winter.’ Lastly, a curious fact about the Mammoth carcases and skeletons in Siberia is that in several cases they have been found standing upright in the ground, as if they had sunk down where they lived in soft ground, and been frozen in that position, a position apparently inconceivable in a floating carcase." (1887:59, 60).
Mammoth Migration
Could the mammoth not have wandered south in autumn, just like the reindeer in Siberia’s arctic tundra, and the caribou in Canada’s Barren Grounds?
Sir Henry H. Howorth: "This theory assuredly ignores most completely some elementary facts which are accessible. In the first place it must be remembered that the question is not so much one of climate as of food. There is nothing here for these great beasts to eat in summer and they cannot browse like reindeer on the tundra mosses and grasses. In summer no less than winter the district where the Mammoth remains chiefly abound is quite unsuited for their mode of feeding, and neither in quantity nor in quality could they have supplied their wants, they must inevitably have starved.
“So that to come there in summer would be to migrate to a practical desert. For we must remember it is not a question of finding food for a sporadic pachyderm or two, but for enormous herds, whose hecatombs are buried there. Again, if we consider the configuration of Siberia, and the vast distances over which this migration would have to pass, we shall come to but one conclusion. Where could the mammoths from Kamskatka, or the banks of the Kolyma, or the Islands of New Siberia, migrate to? Where, in fact, could any of those living on the shores of the Polar Sea migrate to, to gain a favourable wintering-station? ... There is only one possible conclusion from these facts, namely that affirmed very strongly by Brandt, that the Mammoth and his companions lived where their remains occur in Northern as well as Southern Siberia, under conditions of climate, which made such a thing possible, and did this, notwithstanding the solemn misgivings of the prophets of Uniformity who realize what such a conclusion really involves. [Uniformity: their proponents say, that there have been no great catastrophes in the past. Everything has run its course already then peacefully, like today]
"One of these conclusions must undoubtedly have been that the climate was sufficiently temperate for trees to have grown much further north than they do at present, and also to prevent the country from being wrapped in ice and snow for the greater part of the year. As I have said, we have direct evidence that forests in the Mammoth age did exist very far north of their present limits. Such remains form an excellent thermometer by which to define the isothermal lines of that period, and I will now collect some examples of the remains of trees found underground on the tundras. They consist of two series, those which are the result of drift, and those which clearly grew on the spot. The shrewd observers who lived in Siberia long ago discriminated between these kinds, and gave the name of Noahshina to those which have drifted, and of Adamshina to the indigenous timber..." - Howorth, H. H. (1887:62-64).
"Sannikof, we are told, found on the island of Kotolnoi (= one of the New Siberian Islands) the skulls and bones of horses, buffaloes, oxen, and sheep in such abundance that these animals must formerly have lived there in large herds. At present, however, the icy wilderness produces nothing that could afford nourishment, nor would they be able to endure the climate. Sannikof concludes that a milder climate must formerly have prevailed here, and that these animals may therefore have been contemporary with the Mammoth, whose remains are found in every part of the island. Another circumstance, whence he infers a change of climate, is the frequent occurrence, here, as well as in the island of New Siberia, of large trees partially fossilized. ...
"Erman says: ‘It cannot escape notice, that as we go nearer to the coast, the deposits of wood below the earth, and also the deposits of bones which accompany the wood, increase in extent and frequency. Here, beneath the soil of Yakutsk, the trunks of birch-trees lie scattered, only singly, but on the other hand they form such great and well-stored strata under the tundras, between the Yana and the Indigirka, that the Yakugirs never think of using any other fuel than fossil wood. They obtain it on the shores of lakes, which are continually throwing up trunks of trees from the bottom. In the same proportion the search for ivory grows continually more certain and productive, from the banks of the lakes in the interior to the hills along the coast of the icy sea. Both these kindred phenomena attain the greatest extent and importance at the furthest chain of the islands above mentioned (i.e. New Siberia &c., which are separated from the coast of the mainland by a strait about 150 km wide, of very moderate depth).’
"Nordenskiold, speaking of the Yenissei tundra, says it is in summer completely free of snow, but at a limited depth from the surface the ground is continually frozen, and adds that in it the Mammoth remains are found, and along with them masses of old drift wood originating from the Mammoth period, known by the Russian natives of Siberia under the distinctive name of Noah’s wood." - Howorth, H. H. (1887:66, 67).
In what kind of a climate has the mammoth lived in northern Siberia?
Sir Henry H. Howorth: "The evidence, then of the débris of vegetation and of the fresh water and land snails found with the Mammoth’s remains, amply confirm the à priori conclusion that the climate of Northern Siberia was at the epoch of the Mammoth much more temperate than now. It seems that the botanical facies of the district was not unlike that of Southern Siberia, that the larch, the willow, and the alnaster were probably the prevailing trees, that the limit of woods extended far to the north of its present range, and doubtless as far as the Arctic Sea; and that not only the mean temperature was much higher, but it is probable that the winters were of a temperate and not of an Arctic type." (1887:71).
The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). After: Z. Burian, J.J. Sacharov and I.T. Sanderson (1966). This elephant has lived in northern Siberia up to the shores of the Arctic Sea, up to 80° North. In what kind of a climate, and on what kind of a plant-cover has it grazed up there? Could this giant have lived in the Far North in an arctic climate, in ice and snow, just like the reindeer and the musk-ox of today?
Adams’ Mammoth
Have they found Adams’ Mammoth at the Lena Delta in the ice or in the frozen ground? If in the permanently frozen ground: how, then, did this hairy elephant get into the frozen ground?
Sir Henry H. Howorth: "As has already been shown by subsequent explorers, Adams’s Mammoth was not found as asserted in a mass of ice, but, like the other specimens which have been described, was found in beds of gravel intercalated with clay, such beds, wherever they have been found in situ, being continuous and undisturbed. Now, by no physical process known to us can we understand how soft flesh could thus be buried in the ground while it is frozen as hard as flint without disintegrating it. We cannot push an elephant’s body into a mass of solid ice or hard frozen ground without entirely destroying the fine articulations and pounding the whole mass into a jelly, nor would we fail in greatly disturbing the ground in the process. When we, therefore, meet with great carcases of Mammoths with their most delicate tissues, their eyes, trunks, and feet beautifully preserved and lying several feet underground in hard, frozen, undisturbed gravel and clay, we cannot escape the conclusion that when these carcases were buried the ground was soft and yielding.
"Here, then, we have a very important and inevitable difficulty from which there is no escape, and which the advocates of Uniformity, that the doctrine is currently held, would do well to bravely face. The facts compel us to admit that when the Mammoth was buried in Siberia the ground was soft and the climate therefore comparatively mild and genial, and that immediately afterwards the same ground became frozen and the same climate became Arctic, and that they have remained so to this day, and this not gradually and in accordance with some slowly continuous astronomical or cosmical changes, but suddenly and per saltem.
"Again, as I have said, the instances of the soft parts of the great pachyderms being preserved are not mere local and sporadic ones, but they form a chain of examples along the whole length of Siberia, from the Urals to the land of the Chukchis, so that we have to do here with a condition of things which prevails and meteorological conditions that extend over a continent.
"When we find such a series ranging so widely preserved in the same perfect way, and all evidencing a sudden change of climate from a comparatively temperate one to one of great rigour, we cannot help concluding that they all bear witness to a common event. We cannot postulate a separate climatic cataclysm for each individual case and each individual locality, but we are forced to the conclusion that the now permanently frozen zone in Asia became frozen at the same time from the same causes. ... Thus, Dr. Buckland wrote seventy years ago: ‘One thing, however, is nearly certain, that if any change of climate has taken place, it took place suddenly, for how otherwise could the elephant’s carcase, found entire in ice at the mouth of the Lena, have been preserved from putrefaction till it was frozen up with the water of the then existing ocean’" (1887:95-97).
The Mammoth perished suddenly in a global Flood
Why is the woolly mammoth not living now anymore in northern Siberia and North America? Why has it died out?
Sir Henry H. Howorth: "In Siberia, as we have seen, the death of the Mammoth and its companions was immediately followed by a sudden declension in temperature, which of itself and in the absence of other causes made that area incompatible with the life conditions of the Mammoth, but this was a correlative occurrence, and not the immediate cause of the great destruction, since it only operated over a very small portion of the area from which the Mammoth and its companions disappeared.
"The fact of the bones occurring in great caches or deposits, in which various species are mixed pell-mell, is very important. If animals die occasionally from natural causes they become toothless and old, different species do not come together to do so, nor does the lion come to take his last sleep with the lamb. The fact of finding masses of animal remains of mixed species, all showing the same state of preservation, not only permits to a more or less contemporary death, but is quite fatal to the theory that they ended their days peaceably by purely normal causes.
"Bones again weather and decay very fast, if exposed to the air. And consequently when we find bones, with their fine and delicate angles and muscular attachments preserved intact, in many cases lying together as when articulated, over the wide area of a whole continent, and for the most part, so far as we can judge, in the same mineral condition and state of decay, we must conclude that these facts are only consistent with the animals having died together, and been protected from decay.
"If they had been exposed to the air and to the severe transitions between mid-winter and mid-summer which characterize arctic latitudes, they would have decayed rapidly; but their state of preservation proves that they were covered over and protected immediately after their deposition, and have remained so covered and protected ever since, and this along many degrees of longitude, and by continuous undisturbed beds of clay and gravel. Every effort, to find any still operating cause by which the bones could be so protected and covered in by clay, or gravel, or mud far away from the great rivers, and in the more or less raised mounds and hillocks on the tundra, has utterly failed." (1887:179-181).
"If we are to summon some normal cause not now operating for these facts, it certainly seems more reasonable that with effects so completely alike over such a wide area we should summon one cause and not several, and attribute the aberrant conditions showing so much uniformity to some uniform impulse. Here, again, the burden of proof is upon those who deny this view, and treat the remains not as the result of some wide spread catastrophe, but as evidence of as many catastrophes as there are skeletons. ... These débris of a former world have every sign that they formed parts of a contemporaneous fauna destroyed at one time, and are not the wreckage of centuries of death.
"However ingeniously and with whatever subtlety we may deal with our evidence, the facts constrain us therefore to one inevitable conclusion, namely, that the Mammoth and its companions perished by some wide-spread catastrophe which operated over a wide area and not through the slow processes of the ordinary struggle for existence, and that the greater portion of the remains we find in Siberia and Europe are not the result of gradual accumulation under normal causes for untold ages, but the result of one of Nature’s hecatombs on a grand and wide-spread scale, when a vast fauna perished simultaneously.
"We must next inquire what the nature of this catastrophe was. Let us, then, focus on the necessary conditions. We want a cause that should kill the animals, and yet not break to pieces their bodies, or even mutilate them, a cause which would in some cases disintegrate the skeletons without weathering the bones. We want a cause that would not merely do this as a wide-spread murrain or plague might, but one which would bury the bodies as well as kill the animals, which would take up gravel and clay and lay them down again, and which could sweep together animals of different sizes and species, and mix them with trees and other débris of vegetation. What cause competent to do this is known to us, except rushing water on a great scale?
"Water would drown the animals, and yet would not mutilate the bodies. It would kill them all with complete impartiality, irrespective of their strength, age, or size. It would take up clay and earth, and cover the bodies with it. This is the very work it is doing daily on a small scale. Not only could it do this, but it is the only cause known to me capable of doing the work on a scale commensurate with the effects we see in Siberia. What direct evidence, then, have we that it was in fact a great flood of waters?
"The first piece of evidence I would quote is of a singularly direct kind, and we owe it to the experienced skill of Professor Brandt. Speaking of the famous rhinoceros on the Wilui by Pallas, he says, ‘On a careful examination of the head of the Rhinoceros Tichorinus (= a woolly rhinoceros) from the Wilui, it was further remarkable that the blood-vessels and even the fine capillaries were seen to be filled with brown coagulated blood, which in many places, still preserved its red colour.’ (Proceedings of the Berlin Academy, 1846, 223). This is exactly the kind of evidence we look for when we want to know whether an animal has been drowned or suffocated. Asphyxia is always accompanied by the gorging of the capillaries with blood, and the facts justify at all events a probable inference that this particular rhinoceros was the victim of drowning.
"Brandt goes on to tell us how, in conjunction with Hedenstrom, he made a careful microscopic examination of the earth which was attached to these rhinoceros remains, and found it to consist of two kinds, the most important being mould containing vegetable fragments, and which he took for the remains of fresh-water plants, and the soil from a fresh-water deposit.
"Schrenck submitted the head of the Rhinoceros Merckii, already described, to a similar examination, and one passage in his memoir is singularly interesting when taken in conjunction with the remarks of Brandt just quoted. Speaking of its nostrils, he says, ‘They were wide open, and in the case of the one on the right side, which was uninjured, a number of horizontal folds were ranged in rows about. The mouth was also partly open, whence it may be concluded that the animal died from suffocation, which it tried to avoid by keeping the nostrils wide asunder.’ (Proceedings of the Berlin Academy, 1846, 224). It would not be easy to adduce more convincing evidence than that furnished by these two heads, the only examples which have been sufficiently examined, one from the Wilui, the other from a tributary of the Yana.
"Professor Brandt has discussed the singular fact that in several cases, three of which have been described by himself, and one by Mr. O. Fisher, bodies of the Mammoth, either with their flesh preserved or with their skeletons intact, have occurred, standing upright and facing the north. This he argues, makes it probable that the great pachyderms of Siberia sank in the deluge of mud, and were thus covered over, and adds the very pertinent sentence, ‘Es kann aber wenn dies der Fall ist keine vom hohen Süden her ausgegangene sondern eine vom Norden her hereingebrochene Fluth ihren Untergang herbeigeführt haben, wenn man überhaupt einer Meeresfluth bedarf, was vielleicht noch nicht ganz feststeht.’ (Proceedings of the Berlin Academy, 1846, 225)." - Howorth, H. H. (1887:183-185).
"This completes my survey of the evidence furnished by the Mammoth itself, and I believe that not only is it consistent with the conclusion that that animal and its companions were finally extinguished by a sudden catastrophe, involving a great diluvial movement over all the northern hemisphere from the Pyrenees to Behring’s Straits, but it is consistent with no other conclusion. The evidence is not only ample, but it is evidence which converges from all sides, and there is literally nothing on the other hand, so far as my wide reading enables me to judge, save a fantastic attachment to the theory of uniformity which revolts against anything in the shape of a catastrophe. Nay, it is more than this, for the facts are too many for such a theory to be held rigidly. It is rather the predicting of one simple general catastrophe constituted by a wide continental flood, instead of a complicated series of lesser catastrophes, involving violent changes of level, changes of climate, and deluges as well.
"Dr. Buckland said many years since, ‘It is probable that the last of these changes (i.e. from heat to cold in the northern regions) was coincident with the extirpation of the Mammoth. That this last change was sudden is shown by the preservation of the carcasses in ice; had it been gradual, it might have caused the extinction of the Mammoth in the polar regions, but would afford no reason for its equal extirpation in lower latitudes; but if sudden and violent, and attended by a general inundation the temperature preceding this catastrophe may have been warm, and that immediately succeeding it intensely cold; and the cause producing this change of climate may also have been produced an inundation sufficient to destroy and bury in its ruins, the animals which then inhabited the surface of the earth’." (1887:189, 190).
Yakutia
What do we learn from the sediments and fossils, preserved till now in the frozen ground of Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia? What have other scientists found out about this?
Sir Henry H. Howorth: "I will lastly quote the opinion of Erman, whose critical skill and knowledge were perhaps greater than those of any of the Siberian explorers.... He has the following remarks: ‘The ground at Yakutsk ... consists to a depth of at least 100 feet (30 m), of strata of loam, pure sand, and magnetic sand. They have been deposited from waters which at one time, and it may be presumed, suddenly, overflowed the whole country as far as the Polar Sea. In these deepest strata are found twigs, rocks, and leaves of trees of the birch and willow kinds; and even the most unbiased observers would explain this condition of the soil by comparing it to the annual formation of new banks and islands by the floods of the Lena at the present time; for these consist of similar muddy deposits and the spoils of willow banks, but they lie about 100 feet (30 m) higher than the ground which was covered by these ancient floods. Everywhere throughout these immense alluvial deposits are now lying the bones of antediluvian quadrupeds [four-legged animals before the Flood] along with vegetable remains.’ After the passage about the hoards of birch-trees under the tundras and in New Siberia... Erman goes on to say, ‘It is only in the lower strata of the New Siberian wood-hills that the trunks have that position which they would assume in swimming or sinking undisturbed.
"‘On the summit of the hills they lie flung upon one another in the wildest disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops broken off or crushed as if they had been thrown with great violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up. Now a smooth sea covering the tops of these hills on the islands, would, even with the present form of the interjacent ground, extend to Yakutsk, which is about 270 feet (82.2 m) above the sea.
"But before the latest deposits of mud and sand had settled down, and had raised the ground more than 100 feet (30,4 m), the surface of such a sea as we have supposed would have reached much further up, even to the cliffs in the valley of the Lena. So it is clear that at the time when the elephants and trunks of trees were heaped up together, one flood extended from the centre of the continent to the furthest barrier in the sea as it is now.
"‘That flood may have poured down from the highest mountains through the rocky valleys. The animals and trees which it carried off from above could sink but slowly in the muddy and rapid waves, but must have been thrown upon the older parts of Kotelnoi and New Siberia in the greatest number and with the greatest force, because these islands opposed the last bar to the diffusion of the waters.’" - Howorth, H. H. (1887:190, 191).
Sir Henry H. Howorth: "Evidence of every kind therefore converges to show that in the Mammoth period Alaska and North-West America enjoyed a fairly mild climate, and shared with Northern Siberia conditions which enabled the same fauna to exist and thrive there as throve in the Old World from Behring’s Straits to the Rhine, and that this climate was rapidly changed to one of intense severity.
"The extinction, I feel assured the more I examine the facts, was due, not to normal causes, but to exceedingly abnormal ones. In America, as in Europe, the number of the remains, and their universal distribution, contrast notably with the scarcity and local character of the débris of mammals in other sub-aerial beds, on other geological horizons, and point, there, as here, to their having been the victims of a catastrophe. The unweathered bones, the intact skeletons, the crowds of animals of different species found together, the similarity of conditions of the remains, all converge upon one conclusion, namely, the existence of a great and sudden hecatomb (= many victims killed). Try as we will, we cannot understand how the horse, for instance, which now revels in the prairies, and which was unknown to the Indians at the Spanish conquest, and yet which was very widely distributed in pleistocene times, could have disappeared from so congenial a country save by a widespread catastrophe."
"Dr. Warren says very rightly: ‘The cause of the disappearance of the mastodon seems to be mysterious. We are naturally disposed to believe that an animal of so large a size, of so great a strength, and such extensive distribution in various parts of the earth, must have required some great and general catastrophe to overwhelm and annihilate it.’" - Howorth, H. H. (1887.268, 311).
Late Pleistocene woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis). After: W. von Koenigswald (1983:194) The woolly rhinoceros was mainly a grazer, like the living African White rhinoceros. Both have the square upper lip of the grazer. Its two horns were flat, like a knife, in contrast to those of the living rhinos, which are round.