4.3" Woolly Rhino (Coelodonta) Jaw Section - Rhine River, Germany

The woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) is an extinct species of rhinoceros that was common throughout Europe and northern Asia during the Pleistocene epoch. As the last and most derived member of the Pleistocene rhinoceros lineage, the woolly rhinoceros was well adapted to its environment. Stocky limbs and thick woolly fur made it well suited to the steppe-tundra environment that it lived in.



The wooly rhino grew to 11 feet in length and stood 6 feet at its shoulders. It had a huge pair of horns that grew inline on its snout. The front horn grew to lengths in excess of 3 feet. Like modern rhinos, wooly rhinoceroses had horns composed of keratin. They first appeared in the fossil record 1.8 million years ago and went extinct as recently as 10,000 years ago.

The gravel deposits along the Rhine River used to produce a large number of Pleistocene fossils while miners quarried for gravel aggregate. They have become much harder to come by in recent years as the quarry operations have become more mechanized, often destroying fossils in the process.