With a huge nose horn, thick fur and a very strong skeleton, rhinoceros is one of the most famous and well-known Pleistocene animals. Rhinoceros horns are formed from keratin with the same composition as hair and nails, so they can not be preserved as fossils, with the exception of a few rhinoceros horns preserved in frozen soil. Transverse bands have been found on all the rhinoceros rhinoceros nasal horn specimens, which represent the annual growth zone, indicating that the dry and cold grassland where rhinoceros rhinoceros lives has a strong seasonal climate environment.
Like the long hair of mammoths and living yaks, the thick hair of rhinoceros can keep warm, obviously indicating that it is suitable for life in the cold Tundra and dry grassland. The very wide nasal bone and ossified nasal septum indicate that rhinoceros has two fairly large nasal cavities, which increases the range of heat exchange in cold air, helps it warm up the air when breathing and reduces heat loss. The long, flat horns of the rhinoceros are tilted forward to scrape away the ice and snow in winter, so as to find hay for feeding.
Paleontologists have a better understanding of the anatomy of rhinoceros, because some dried rhinoceros bodies have been found in permafrost or asphalt deposits, and their thick hair covering their whole body like a blanket has been preserved. Rhinoceros once lived together with human ancestors. Primitive humans painted the images of rhinoceros on cave murals, so that we can see what it looked like when it lived.
The rhinoceros originated in China's Qinghai Tibet Plateau in the Pliocene, spread to North China in the early Pleistocene, then migrated westward and reached Europe in the penultimate ice age. In the late Pleistocene, woolly rhinoceros had a larger distribution than any known living and extinct rhinoceros, covering the northern part of Eurasia, from the Korean Peninsula in the east to Scotland and even Spain in the West. With the advent of the last ten thousand years of warm climate, the rhinoceros will disappear.