![]() No description of a rhino would be complete without mentioning the horn and this goes double for Coelodonta as it had two pronounced horns rising from its snout. The front horn at up to two meters long was the longer of the two, with the second horn rising from the middle of the snout being just over half to two thirds as big. The classical explanation for these horns is that they were what are termed sexually selected characteristics. This is based upon the knowledge that the horn would have been growing throughout the animals life, no more than a stump in a juvenile to fully developed in mature individuals. An older animal would have a more developed horn than younger individuals signalling to members of the opposite sex that it had the genetic makeup and success to make it to later life, and was more deserving of passing its genes down to the next generation than lesser individuals that had less developed horns. Such reasoning would explain the progression to larger horn sizes. ![]() ![]() This method of digestion seems to have been very efficient for Coelodonta as specimens where the main body is still preserved show that Coelodonta had a hump that rose up from its back above the shoulder blades. This hump was supported from within by the forwards dorsal vertebrae that had elongated neural spines growing from them, much larger the neural spines of the other vertebrae. This hump would have served as fat storage so that Coelodonta could build up fat reserves in the milder spring and summer so that it could better survive the colder winter when the plants had begun to die back, and possibly even had a deep covering of snow and ice. #RHINOCEROS DINOSAUR FULL#It’s uncertain exactly what kind of herbivore Coelodonta was. Some people think that Coelodonta was a grazer that cropped the grass plains like a cow, while others believe that it was a browser than fed from low growing plants. Either one is plausible although most lean towards the grazing idea as grasses would have been much more abundant than more complex low growing plants. Coelodonta is thought to have used a fermentation method of processing the cellulose rich grasses in order to get the full nutritional benefit from the nutritionally poor vegetation of the ecosystem. This is actually a very clever method of digestion to adopt since as the grass is broken down by fermentation inside the gut of Coelodonta, it generates a small amount of heat that would have the added effect of warming the body from the inside. #RHINOCEROS DINOSAUR SERIES#Coelodonta is one of the most commonly represented ‘ice age’ mammals, yet surprisingly it often only gets a name mention. Popularly known as the woolly rhino, Coelodonta resembled the large rhinos that we know today from Africa, but with a complete covering of fur over its body. This was the main survival adaptation of Coelodonta which inhabited most of Eurasia for over two and a half million years.Ĭoelodonta lived at a time that saw a series of glaciations across the Northern hemisphere that saw sheets of ice sweeping over much of the land, to receding back before covering the land again. This toing and froing of the ice sheets, combined with the colder climate that caused much of the lower soil depths to be permanently frozen, created vast expanses of frozen plains that were covered in grasses interspersed with low growing vegetation, and it is this ecosystem that Coelodonta seems to have been most adapted to. As with many similar herbivores, Coelodonta had sharp incising teeth at the front of the mouth and mashing molar teeth at the back. Between these two sets of teeth was a gap called the diastema, something else that is common amongst herbivorous mammals. ![]()
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