A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.
Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.
Thirdly — and perhaps harder for creationists to grasp — the authors use well-established principles of population genetics to show that the woolly rhinoceros probably did not go extinct as a result of a long-term population decline. Such a decline would have produced increasing inbreeding and a corresponding loss of genetic diversity. Instead, the data show that woolly rhinos retained the genetic diversity expected of a large, widespread population right up until almost the point of extinction. This raises the obvious and intriguing question of why these cold-adapted rhinos disappeared so abruptly from the fossil record.
Creationists may struggle to understand why extinction is regarded as an integral part of evolutionary biology, but the reason is straightforward. Extinction is just as predictable an outcome of evolutionary processes as diversification or genetic change in response to environmental pressures. Understanding the mechanism of the woolly rhino’s extinction therefore provides valuable insight into how and why such events occur.
Woolly rhinoceros – background information. Woolly rhinocerosThe palaeogeneticists reached their conclusions by analysing DNA extracted from 14,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros flesh recovered from the stomach of a permafrost-preserved wolf pup, which had consumed it as its final meal.
(Coelodonta antiquitatis)
- Time range: Middle to Late Pleistocene (~400,000–14,000 years ago)
- Distribution: Eurasia, from western Europe across Siberia to northeastern Asia
- Habitat: Cold, dry steppe–tundra (“mammoth steppe”)
- Diet: Primarily grasses and sedges (grazing specialist)
Key features
- Thick woolly coat and dense underfur for insulation
- Compact body with reduced extremities to conserve heat
- Large nasal horn, probably used for snow-clearing vegetation as well as defence
- Teeth adapted for abrasive, grass-dominated diets
Evolutionary context
- Closely related to modern Asian rhinoceroses, not African species
- Highly specialised for cold, open environments that dominated much of Ice Age Eurasia
- Genetic evidence shows large, widespread populations persisted until shortly before extinction
Extinction
- Disappeared near the end of the last Ice Age (~14,000 years ago)
- Not associated with long-term genetic decline or inbreeding
- Likely driven by rapid climate change, habitat loss, and possibly human pressure
- Represents a classic example of sudden extinction despite prior evolutionary success
Why it matters
- Demonstrates that extinction can be abrupt and environmentally driven
- Undermines simplistic narratives that extinction always follows slow population collapse
- Reinforces extinction as a normal and predictable outcome of evolutionary processes
This makes the woolly rhinoceros an especially instructive case study in Ice Age ecology, population genetics, and the dynamics of extinction.
The wider significance of this study is explored in an article in The Conversation by Timothy Neal Coulson, Professor of Zoology and Joint Head of the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, who was not an author of the original paper. His article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence and has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.
DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction
Woolly rhinos once roamed the Earth far and wide.
The woolly rhino, Coelodonta antiquitatis, would have been an impressive sight to the ancient people who painted images of them on cave walls and carved figurines of them out of bone, antler, ivory and wood.
The sadly now extinct rhino lived on the steppes and tundra of Europe and Asia, living alongside people for thousands of years. And a new study of woolly rhino DNA, extracted from the stomach of a wolf challenges a long held belief about species at risk of extinction.
The species, which evolved in the middle of the Pleistocene era, approximately half a million years ago, weighed up to three tonnes. It was similar in size to the two largest rhino species alive today, the white rhino of southern and eastern Africa and the one-horned rhino of India.
The woolly rhino was well adapted to live in ice age conditions. It had a thick layer of fat below the skin, a warm, woolly fleece and small ears and tail to minimise heat loss. It also had a shoulder hump to store fat, to help it survive through periods of food scarcity, and a horn that, in exceptional cases, could grow to 1.6 metres in length.
Abrasions on horns have led biologists to suspect that the rhino used its front horn (the species had two horns, like most species of rhino alive today) to sweep aside snow so it could access the grass and shrubs on which it fed.
At their peak, woolly rhinos could be found from the Iberian peninsula in the west to northeastern Siberia in the east. If it was cold, and there was grass to eat, they seemed to do well. But by around 14,000 years ago, they were gone.
Woolly rhinos were a victim of a changing climate, which made their habitat steadily vanish. The mammoth steppes they lived on were replaced by first a shrubbier habitat and eventually forest. They were also occasionally hunted by people, and that didn’t help them. A lack of good habitat, with a helping hand from the most efficient predator to have ever evolved, signed their death knell.
A close-up of the wolf puppy, which was frozen for 14,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.
Mietje Germonpré - via CNN
As a species heads towards extinction, animals in the final few cohorts typically become ever more inbred. Because the woolly rhino’s extinction was thought to be a long, drawn-out affair, scientists assumed that individuals living 15,000 years ago would start to show genetic signatures of inbreeding. The findings of a recent paper from a team by led by Solveig Guðjónsdóttir are consequently quite a surprise.
The woolly rhino sample came from the frozen remains of an ice age wolf discovered in permafrost near the village of Tumat in north-eastern Siberia. When the ancient wolf was autopsied, the researchers identified a small fragment of preserved tissue in its stomach.
The team Guðjónsdóttir led skilfully sequenced the remains of a 14,400-year woolly rhino found in the stomach of the wolf pup. Both the wolf and rhino died just a few centuries before the woolly giant disappeared.
A healthy adult woolly rhino would have been too big for a pack of wolves to take down and kill, so it seems probable that the remains were either scavenged, or from a baby. Regardless of the source of the meal, analysis of the genome revealed that the woolly rhino was not inbred.
The genetic diversity of an individual can also be used to estimate the population size of breeding individuals using a statistical method called Pairwise Sequentially Markovian Coalescent modelling (PSMC). PSMC models compare differences between genome sequences on the two strands of DNA each individual has, one from each parent.
The model uses this information to estimate the distribution of times since each bit of the sequence shared a common ancestor. The greater the difference between the two strands of DNA, the greater the genetic difference between the parents, and the larger the population size would have been.
As part of the study, the researchers analysed two older woolly rhino genomes that had already been published and compared them to the new specimen. Their analysis showed that although the population of woolly rhinos had declined since its peak, it was still sufficiently large to maintain genetic diversity.
Guðjónsdóttir’s paper is important for two reasons. First, it is a wonderful demonstration of how DNA retrieved from the most unlikely of sources can tells us about population declines from millennia ago.
Second, it shows we might need a little bit more research into how population declines of long extinct animals might influence the statistics that geneticists frequently use, and we might need to revisit our current understanding. The woolly rhinos range certainly contracted as the world warmed, and its population size shrank, but it might not have died out as genetically impoverished relic.
Maybe the woolly rhino held onto its genomic diversity for much longer than we think it should have. So, we should keep checking the stomach contents of long-dead predators found in the permafrost, however unpleasant that task might sound.
Timothy Neal Coulson, Professor of Zoology and Joint Head of Department of Biology, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Publication:
This study highlights a recurring problem for creationism: the evidence does not merely contradict its conclusions; it contradicts the framework itself. The existence of recoverable DNA tens of thousands of years old, the ability to trace population histories through genetics, and the clear signal of a large, thriving population persisting until near the point of extinction are all features of a deep-time world that simply cannot be reconciled with a recent creation or a global flood.
Equally damaging to the creationist narrative is the way this research overturns an assumption previously held by scientists themselves. Far from enforcing an ideological orthodoxy, evolutionary biology advances precisely because its practitioners are willing to abandon ideas when new data demand it. That willingness to be wrong, to revise and refine, is not a weakness of science but its defining strength—and it stands in stark contrast to belief systems that must defend fixed conclusions regardless of the evidence.
The woolly rhinoceros also exposes the hollowness of claims that extinction is somehow incompatible with evolution or requires special pleading. Extinction is not a failure of evolutionary theory but one of its most robust predictions. Species flourish, specialise, and sometimes vanish when environments change faster than biology can respond. That this can happen even to large, widespread, genetically healthy populations is precisely what the fossil record and population genetics lead us to expect.
Creationism, by contrast, offers no coherent explanation for why a world allegedly designed to be “very good” should be littered with the remains of vanished species, nor why those remains consistently tell a story of deep time, environmental change, and natural processes. The woolly rhinoceros did not disappear because of theological necessity or human misinterpretation, but because nature operates according to laws that can be studied, tested, and understood. Once again, it is the evidence—quietly, methodically, and repeatedly—that does the refuting.
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