Fossil bones of Epiaceratherium itjilik. About 75% of the animal’s bones were recovered, including diagnostic bones such as the teeth, mandibles and parts of the cranium.
Pierre Poirier © Canadian Museum of Nature
Another day, another incidental refutation of the childish biblical creation myth.
This one comes, as so many do, from scientists doing what scientists do best: uncovering the facts and following the evidence wherever it leads.
In this case, the evidence shows that a species of rhinoceros was living in the Canadian High Arctic about 23 million years ago. Even more significantly, the find suggests that rhinoceroses, once widespread across Eurasia and North America, crossed into North America far later than previously thought, by way of northern land connections that remained viable well into the Cenozoic.
Scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature have just announced the discovery of the species they named Epiaceratherium itjilik in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The discovery creates problems for creationism on several fronts. Most obviously, its age places it far outside the tiny timescale permitted by creationist mythology. It also demolishes the notion that modern animal distributions can be explained by descent from a single surviving pair a mere 4,000 years ago, because no such recent land bridge existed to carry rhinoceroses into North America. Instead, the fossil fits neatly into the well-established evolutionary history of rhinos, which stretches back roughly 40 million years, and into the geological evidence for changing sea levels and intermittent northern land connections between Eurasia and North America. These independent lines of evidence converge for the simple reason that they describe what really happened.
The fossilised remains, representing about three-quarters of a skeleton, were recovered from the rich fossil deposits of Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut. The animal is now the northernmost rhinoceros species yet known, and its excellent preservation has given palaeontologists an unusually complete picture of this unexpected Arctic browser.
The evolutionary history of rhinos. Rhinoceroses are members of the mammalian order Perissodactyla, the odd-toed ungulates, which also includes horses and tapirs. Their deeper ancestry lies among early perissodactyls that appeared in the Eocene, and the rhinoceros lineage itself emerged more than 40 million years ago. Early rhinocerotoids were generally much smaller than modern rhinos and, importantly, most were hornless. The familiar keratin horn is a comparatively late development in the group. [1]
The fossil history of rhinos is far richer and more diverse than the handful of species alive today might suggest. During the Eocene, Oligocene and Miocene, rhinocerotids diversified into a wide range of forms occupying different ecological niches across Asia, Europe, North America and later Africa. Some were lightly built forest browsers; others were large open-country grazers; and some evolved into truly gigantic animals. The best-known of these was Paraceratherium (also called Indricotherium), a hornless relative from the Oligocene that is generally regarded as the largest land mammal ever to have lived. [2]
Early rhinoceroses do not look much like the modern stereotype. Many had relatively long limbs, smaller bodies, and lacked the nasal horns associated with living species. Over time, different branches evolved different body plans and feeding strategies. Some remained browsers in wooded habitats, while others became more specialised for feeding in more open environments. This long evolutionary history produced multiple extinct subfamilies and lineages, including hornless forms such as the aceratheres, alongside more familiar horned rhinoceroses. [3]
Rhinos were once much more widespread than they are now. Fossils show that members of the family ranged across much of Eurasia and North America, with repeated dispersals between continents when geography and climate permitted. The new Arctic Canadian species is part of that broader story of movement and diversification. Rather than being recent arrivals from a post-Flood dispersal fantasy, rhinos have a deep and well-documented fossil history that tracks ancient climates, vegetation, and intermittent land connections such as those between Asia and North America. [4]
One especially famous late branch was the woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis, a cold-adapted species of the Pleistocene steppe. Evidence suggests that the Coelodonta lineage originated in Asia, with early forms present on the Tibetan Plateau by around 3.6 million years ago, before later spreading across northern Eurasia during the Ice Ages. [5]
Today, only five living species survive: the white and black rhinos in Africa, and the Indian, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos in Asia. These are the last remnants of a once-flourishing and geographically widespread lineage. The Asian rhinos belong to three surviving species recognised by the IUCN Asian Rhino Specialist Group, while Africa retains the two living African species. [6]
In short, rhinos are not recent creations but the surviving twigs of a deep evolutionary tree stretching back tens of millions of years. Their fossils record a long history of change, dispersal, adaptation, and extinction — exactly what evolutionary theory predicts, and exactly what a literalist young-Earth creation story cannot accommodate. [7]
The discovery, and its importance for understanding the evolutionary history and dispersal of rhinoceroses, is the subject of a press release from the Canadian Museum of Nature:
A rhino from the Arctic
Museum scientists describe an extinct rhino species from Canada’s High Arctic
Scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature have announced the discovery and description of an extinct rhinoceros from the Canadian High Arctic. The nearly complete fossil skeleton of the new species was recovered from the fossil-rich lake deposits in Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut and is the most northerly rhino species known.
Rhinoceroses have an evolutionary history that spanned over 40 million years, encompassing all continents except South America and Antarctica. The “Arctic rhino” lived about 23 million years ago, during the Early Miocene and is most closely related to other rhino species that thrived in Europe millions of years earlier.
The scientific paper describing this new species, named Epiaceratherium itjilik [eet-jee-look], has been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.Today there are only five species of rhinos in Africa and Asia, but in the past they were found in Europe and North America, with more than 50 species known from the fossil record. The addition of this Arctic species to the rhino family tree now offers new insights to our understanding of their evolutionary history.
Dr. Danielle Fraser, lead author
Palaeobiology
Canadian Museum of Nature
Ottawa
Ontario, Canada.
The study also presents an updated family tree for rhinocerotids and provides evidence that the new Arctic species migrated to North America across a land bridge that may have been a passage for terrestrial-mammal dispersal millions of years later than previous evidence suggests.
About Epiaceratherium itjilik
Rhinocerotids came in a variety of shapes and sizes, from large and hippo-like to relatively small and hornless.
Epiaceratherium itjilik was relatively small and slight, similar in size to the modern Indian rhinoceros, but lacking a horn. The Arctic specimen is thought to be early to mid-adulthood based on moderate wear of the cheek teeth.
The species name “itjilik” means “frosty” or “frost” in Inuktitut. The research team wanted to honour the rhino’s High Arctic home, so they consulted with Jarloo Kiguktak, an Inuit Elder and former mayor of Grise Fiord, the most northerly Inuit community in Canada. He has visited the fossil deposits of Haughton Crater and also participated in multiple paleontological expeditions in the High Arctic.
Most of the rhino’s bones were collected at the Haughton Crater site in 1986 by Dr. Mary Dawson. She was Curator Emeritus at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a trailblazer in Arctic palaeontology. She had uncovered the critical diagnostic parts—the upper and lower teeth, mandibles and parts of the skull—that allowed the CMN team to define it as a rhinocerotid and a new species.
What’s remarkable about the Arctic rhino is that the fossil bones are in excellent condition. They are three dimensionally preserved and have only been partially replaced by minerals. About 75% of the skeleton was discovered, which is incredibly complete for a fossil.
Marisa Gilbert, co-author
Palaeobiology
Canadian Museum of Nature
Ottawa
Ontario, Canada.
Gilbert took part in a number of research trips to the Haughton Crater in the late 2000s, which were led by Dr. Natalia Rybczynski. CMN Research Associate and another co-author of the study. These expeditions resulted in the discovery of another new species, the transitional seal, Puijila darwini.
Additional remains of E. itjilik were found on the later field expeditions led by the CMN, when Dawson joined Rybczynski and Gilbert. They were prospecting the Haughton site as follow-ups to Dawson’s fieldwork. Dawson passed away at age 89 in 2020 and is posthumously cited as the fourth author on the study.
The biogeography story
The presence of this new Arctic species was an impetus for the research team to delve deeper into the evolutionary and biogeographic history of rhinocerotids. Biogeography is the study of how animals and plants evolved and dispersed over time.
Fraser and the team placed the new species in the rhino family tree by studying the occurrence of 57 other taxa of rhinocerotids, almost all extinct. The results came from visiting museum collections, combing through the scientific literature and using databases.
The team was also able to place each rhinocerotid geographically in one of five continental regions . It was an exhaustive process—each species was scored based on where they were found, using a mathematical modeling approach to determine rates of dispersal among those different continents within the family, Rhinocerotidae.
The team’s analysis offers new insights into how rhinos dispersed over millions of years between North America and Europe (via Greenland), using the North Atlantic Land Bridge.
Previous studies suggested this land bridge may have only have functioned as a dispersal corridor until around 56 million years ago. But the new analysis with Epiceratherium itjilik and its related species suggests that dispersals occurred from Europe to North America much more recently, potentially as late as the Miocene.
The importance of Epiaceratherium itjilik was underscored in July 2025 in a paper published in the journal Nature reporting that scientifically relevant, partial proteins were extracted from the animal’s tooth enamel. The study, led by post-doctoral fellow Ryan Sinclair Paterson at the University of Copenhagen, extends by millions of years the timescale for recoverable, evolutionary-informative proteins sequences. The findings opens new avenues for the study of ancient proteins, and their application to understanding mammal evolution.
It’s always exciting and informative to describe a new species. But there is more that comes from the identification of Epiaceratherium itjilik, as our reconstructions of rhino evolution show that the North Atlantic played a much more important role in their evolution than previously thought. More broadly, this study reinforces that the Arctic continues to offer up new knowledge and discoveries that expand on our understanding of mammal diversification over time.
Dr. Danielle Fraser.
The fossil of Epiceratherium itjilik is housed and curated in the fossil collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature. The preparation of the fossil bones for study was completed at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
The research was supported by a grant to Danielle Fraser from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and to Natalia Rybczynski from The W. Garfield Weston Foundation. Logistical support came from the Polar Continental Shelf Program, the Nunavut Planning Commission, and the Nunavut Impact Review Board. Palaeontology permits came from the Government of Nunavut, Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth; and with the permission of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, especially Grise Fiord.
More about the Haughton Crater
The Haughton Crater on Devon Island is a rich source of Early Miocene fossils, including the bones of Epiaceratherium itjilik.
Martin Lipman © Canadian Museum of NaturePublication:
- At 23 km across, the Haughton Crater is the most northern Miocene fossil site known. The Miocene (about 23 to 5.6 million years ago) was an epoch when many families of modern mammals diversified and dispersed between continents.
- The impact crater filled with water, creating a lake which preserved the remains of local plants and animals.
- The site has been extensively studied for its geological characteristics as well as its flora and fauna.
- Evidence from fossil plants shows that the habitat was temperate forest, in contrast to today’s arid and cold permafrost conditions.
- The freezing and thawing of permafrost resulted in fossils being broken apart and bones being brought to the surface, in a process called cryoturbation.
- The bones of E. itjilik were found over an area around 5 to 7 sq. meters.
This discovery is yet another reminder that the history of life on Earth is vastly deeper, richer and more dynamic than the childish creationist caricature allows. A rhinoceros relative living in the Canadian high Arctic 23 million years ago is not the sort of thing that can be squeezed into a world supposedly created just a few thousand years ago, nor into the absurd notion that all modern biodiversity appeared at once without ancestry. It belongs, instead, exactly where evolutionary biology says it should: in a long and branching history of descent, migration, adaptation and extinction.
The find also underlines how science actually works. Researchers did not begin with a dogma and then force the evidence to fit it; they examined the fossils, compared the anatomy, placed the species in its geological and ecological context, and followed the evidence wherever it led. In doing so, they have refined our understanding not only of rhinoceros evolution, but also of how mammals dispersed across ancient northern land connections and adapted to climates very different from those in which their descendants live today.
As so often, the evidence fits comfortably within the Theory of Evolution and at the same time sits awkwardly, if not impossibly, within creationist mythology. Science continues to reveal a real world of deep time, shifting continents, changing climates and evolving lineages. Creationism, by contrast, can only survive by ignoring, denying or distorting discoveries such as this one. The fossils, however, remain what they are: silent but stubborn witnesses to Earth's immense antiquity and to the evolutionary history that creationists need not to be true.
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