Coelodonta antiquitatis Updated

Here is a new reconstruction of the Woolly Rhino, Coelodonta antiquitatis!  I read today the article by Darren Naish on the real-life appearance of woolly rhinos, all the information we have right now:

blogs.scientificamerican.com/t…

There's a little black-and-white illustration by Darren himself that I referred to, and of course I also considered the other pictures there, along with the skeletons and stuff I have on file.

So: here you see a more informed reconstruction, in full colour.  Most particularly here you see the very weird shape of the front horn!  While the rear horn is round in cross-section, the front horn is very markedly flattened from side to side, like a blade.  Also there are 'growth bands' (actually probably just bands of pigmentation) along the length of the horn.  The front edge of the horn is often worn away, so it really seems like the horn was used in foraging some way.  It has been postulated that woolly rhinos used their horns to sweep snow off the grass so they could eat it.  But also it turns out they didn't always live in very cold and snowy climates, in Southern Europe they inhabited cool, dry, wooded grasslands.

I did have the idea the horn was compressed but I didn't know just how much until I read Darren's article!

Another new feature is the band of dark colour around the midsection!  This comes from cave paintings, several in fact, and the dark band is shown as being variable, sometimes narrower, sometimes wider.  Here I made it quite wide.  It is a rather weird look! 

In other modifications, I made the rhino's hump much more prominent, and its head lower.  This again is due to how the rhinos are portrayed in cave paintings.  On the skeletons they do show lengthened spines over the rear of the neck, but the cave paintings show a hump even more prominent than one would guess based on the bones.  Perhaps there was extra muscle, or fat, or hair making the hump seem so huge!

More details you can see here: the ears are quite narrow and small compared to living rhinos.  The mouth is flat and broad, similar to that of the African White Rhino.  What I DON'T illustrate here but which is suggested by the article is that woolly rhinos might have had shorter fur in summer than in winter; my illustration just shows the 'shaggy' form. 

This was just a quick illustration, I wanted to get it in today, maybe I'm one of the first to manage a realistic full-colour depiction of this species!