26.5 million years ago, in the late Oligocene, Asia and Europe were not yet connected, the Middle East and western Siberia were still a vast ocean, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau was only 2,000 meters high. At that time, the Linxia Basin in Gansu was still a lush savanna, roaming a group of huge mammals, they walked from one tree to another, their huge heads hanging down from the top of the tree, and the huge front teeth and tongue rolled up the leaves of the canopy and sent them into their mouths, making loud chewing sounds from time to time.
This animal is the giant rhinoceros, the largest known land mammal in the history of the earth, with a shoulder height of 5.2 meters, if you add the neck and head, its height will exceed 7 meters; and this animal may weigh up to 20 tons, or even 24 tons, which is 4 times the largest African elephant at present, which is close to the size limit of mammals that some scientists think, how many plants need to be wasted to grow like this, which may lay the groundwork for their demise.
Because the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau was not fully uplifted at that time, the giant rhinoceros roamed from the Mongolian plateau, spread all the way along the Tethys Ocean, from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, all the way through the hinterland of present-day Tibet, to India, South Asia, where Pakistan belonged, evolved at least 6 different genera, became the existence of the giant maca on the earth at that time, and now the rhinoceros is completely the gap between pugs and Tibetan mastiffs compared with them.
As the earth's temperature continues to rise, the grassland becomes drier and drier, the grassland area becomes smaller and smaller, and the already sparse trees are less and less, resulting in the mass extinction of animals and plants, and finally 21 million years ago, the last giant rhinoceros on the earth also fell on the barren land, and the largest land mammal entered history, and the skeleton was buried deep in the strata by the long yellow sand and years.
In the 1920s, 21 million years later, the famous American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews came to Mongolia and China, found these huge rhino fossils in the desert of the Gobi Desert, and brought one of the skulls back to New York, exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, causing a huge sensation, and its popularity even overshadowed the largest dinosaur fossil in the public mind.
In the 1950s, farmers in the Linxia area also discovered these huge "keels" and were immediately fascinated by them, believing that they could be used to treat diseases, so they were ground for use as traditional medicine.
The team, led by Researcher Deng Tao of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been looking for fossils in the Linxia area since the 1980s and has found several complete ancient mammal bones, but only a small number of fragments of giant rhinoceros fossils have been found. It wasn't until 2015 that Deng Tao's team discovered a complete giant rhino skull fossil with a length of more than 1 meter and a mandible and ring vertebrae, as well as another giant rhino fossil composed of three vertebrae.
Since then, Deng Tao's team and American scientists have conducted in-depth research on these giant rhino fossils, and finally confirmed that the skull fossil belongs to a new species, and named it Paraceratherium linxiaense, the results of which have been published in the journal Communications-Biology on June 17.
Giant rhinos are thought to have few predators due to their large size, but their pups may be preyed upon by some carnivores, and an 11-meter-long crocodile crocodile at the time may also have killed adult rhinos because of bite marks found on a fossil skeleton of a giant rhinoceros.
How the giant rhinoceros became extinct is still a mystery, generally believed to be related to climate change, low reproductive rates and four tusks of the intubital elephant invading the territory, it may also be like today's African elephants, flaunting the "stomach", constantly encroaching on the forest, resulting in habitat gradually becoming grassland, food sources are becoming more and more scarce, and finally under the action of various factors, they have to tearfully withdraw from the stage of life evolution on earth.
Of course, the consequences of their own sins must be borne by themselves, and the destruction of the ecological environment by giant rhinos and African elephants is similar to that of human beings now. It's just that human beings have a high degree of intelligence, can find ways to tear down the east wall to make up for the west wall, plunder the habitat of other species, raise a huge number of livestock and poultry, and barely maintain the evolution of life on this planet, but as the earth is burned hotter and hotter by fossil fuels, more and more species are extinct at an unprecedented rate, how long can human beings survive?