'Siberian Unicorn' Once Walked Earth With Prehistoric Humans

A new study published recently in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution claims that Elasmotherium, an extinct giant rhinoceros, depicted as a a "Siberian unicorn," inhabited the Earth much longer than formerly assumed by experts.

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According to the research, the shaggy beast once roamed the planet, among humans, sustaining in Eastern Europe and Western Asia until at least 39 millennia ago, around the same time of Neanderthals and early modern humans.
With radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis on 23 specimens of the rhinoceros, researchers are able to discover the existence of the unusual 3.8-ton Elasmotherium sibiricum, formerly believed to have vanished completely 200,000 years ago.

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The “Siberian unicorn”, which would have lived in modern-day Russia and had range extended to areas in Mongolia, northern China and Kazashtan, was implied to have been extinct because of environmental changes regarding its food, including certain types of grasses and herbs, according to the authors of the study.
They say that the animal with the horn up to a meter long could hardly turn to other kinds of food. "Relatives such as the woolly rhino had always eaten a more balanced array of plants, and were much less impacted by a change in habitat," they wrote, and noted that they didn’t go extinct because of human.

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"In addition to this, the persistently restricted geographical range of Elasmotherium (also probably linked to its specialized habitat), as well as the low population size and slow reproductive rate associated with its large body size, would have predisposed it to extinction in the face of environmental change," wrote the experts in the research.
The scientists say the loss of the Siberian unicorn provides a useful case study "displaying the poor resilience of rhinos to environmental change."