Siberian unicorns lived alongside humans, and they were so much cooler than the mythical version. Ancient rhinos were basically magic.

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A reconstruction of what a Siberian unicorn might look like, by Heinrich Harder in 1908
Heinrich Harder/Wikimedia Commons
▼ All rhinos are unicorns, really—they just aren’t pearly white and magical the way our myths say they should be. These powerful beasts get their strength from stocky muscles and keratinized body armor instead of rainbows and magic, but they're the only unicorns we've got. And one extinct species is named accordingly: the Siberian unicorn.
Elasmotherium sibericumwas the last remaining survivor of theElasmotheriumgenus, which was once a large, diverse group of giant rhinos. Siberian unicorns were once thought to have gone extinct during a broad “background extinction” that occurred during the early and middle Pleistocene, which covers a period from around 126,000 to 2.5 million years ago. The species hadn’t been studied much, but it was previously thoughtthatE. sibericumdied out roughly 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
But new research dating the fossilized molars of these ancient unicorns shows that they lasted all the way to the late Quaternary megafaunal extinction. That’s the scientific name for the event you know as the end of the last ice age when many retroactively beloved animals—saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths, for instance—died out as the climate changed. The paper, published this week in the journalNature Ecology & Evolution, dates the most recent fossils to around 35,000 to 39,000 years old. Humans started widely dispersing just before the megafaunal extinction, so there’s been a lot of debate in the past about whether the widespread deaths of various species are due to overhunting or to climate change. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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