This rather impose two - horned rhino skull is 9.2 million years old , which means it precede when our earliest hominid ancestors deviate from chimp . And a skull like this deserves a badass stemma story . coddler alarum : it involves volcanoes and beheading .
fundamentally , this rhino skull was fossilized much like how the eruption of Mount Vesuvius bury Pompeii and preserved it for successfulness . The two - horn rhinoceros was establish throughout the Eastern Mediterranean millions of years ago , and the owner of this particular skull would have lived in what ’s now Turkey . According to researchers at France ’s University of Montpellier , we can retrace much of what happened to this poor beast , but it is n’t pretty .
When the vent catch fire , the rhino would have been killed instantly , essentially cooked to demise as temperatures skyrocketed to temperatures over 750 degrees Fahrenheit . The body would then have been smoke , essentially , as the extreme temperatures would have altogether dehydrated the body . The pyroclastic flow emanating from the volcano would then have started to rive the consistency apart , branch the skull from the rest of the body .
The skull was likely transported about 20 miles off from the volcano by the river of ash , where it then drop the next 9.2 million age until its discovery by the French paleontologists . It ’s a remarkably rarified find , as only about 2 % of all fogey are feel in volcanic rock’n’roll — while volcanoes are an excellent way to fossilise remains , they ’re an even more splendid way to totally destruct them , which is likely what happened to the rest of the rhino ’s body .
For more on this find , check out the complete original newspaper publisher over atPLoS ONE .
FossilPaleontologyScience
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