“I hadn’t thought that enamel could be so beautiful,” Eberle said. The Yukon tooth enamel, the team found, carried the tell-tale signs of coming from a rhinoceros relative. The crystals that make up enamel can grow following different patterns in different types of animals, a bit like a dental fingerprint. She explained that mammal teeth aren’t all built alike. Then she and her colleagues landed on an idea: Eberle put one of the small pieces under a tool called a scanning electron microscope that can reveal the structure of tooth enamel in incredible detail. When Eberle first saw Hodgins’ fossil teeth, now housed in the Yukon Government fossil collections in Whitehorse, she didn’t think she could do much with them.
In this case, the people at the right place and at the right time was a Yukon schoolteacher and her students.Įnamel from a fragment of an ancient rhinoceros tooth as seen under increasing levels of magnification. “The catch is finding fossils in the right place at the right time.” “We know that a land bridge must have been in operation throughout much of the last 66 million years,” Eberle said. There’s just one problem: The geology and environment of the Yukon, which sat at the center of that mass migration route, isn’t conducive to preserving fossils from land animals. “I hadn’t thought that enamel could be so beautiful.” - Jaelyn Eberle Paleontologists believe that animals of all sorts, including mammoths and rhinos, poured over that bridge. In that age, a land bridge called Beringia connected what are today Russia and Alaska. To understand why, imagine the Earth during the Tertiary Period, a span of time that began after the dinosaurs went extinct and ended about 2.6 million years ago. It’s a gap in the fossil record that scientists have been keen to fill. “But this is the first time we have any evidence for ancient mammals, like rhinos, that pre-date the ice age.” Exploring Beringia “In the Yukon, we have truckloads of fossils from ice age mammals like woolly mammoths, ancient horses, and ferocious lions,” said Grant Zazula, a coauthor of the new study and Yukon Government paleontologist. This hefty animal may have tromped through the forests of Northwest Canada roughly 8 to 9 million years ago.Īnd it’s a first: Before the rhino discovery, paleontologists had not found a single fossil vertebrate dating back to this time period in the Yukon. In a study published today (October 31, 2019), Eberle and her colleagues report that the fossil tooth fragments likely came from the jaw of a long-extinct cousin of today’s rhinoceroses. They are pieces of shells from two different species of turtle (top), a fossil from a relative of a modern pike fish (middle) and two fragments of ancient rhino teeth (bottom).
#Prehistoric rhinoceros fossil series#
Series of fossils recovered from the Yukon.
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