Arctic fossil is northern-most rhino species ever found

Millions of years ago, a pony-sized, hornless rhino wandered through the woods and munched on leaves in what is now northern Nunavut, making it the northern-most rhino ever found.

A new study published on Tuesday identifies it as a new species, and offers an intriguing explanation for how it got there.

Epiatheracerium itjilik was about the size of a modern Indian rhinoceros and far smaller than an African rhino, standing about a metre at the shoulder, said Danielle Fraser, lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Researchers found more than 70 per cent of the animal's skeleton in the Haughton Crater on Devon Island, about 1,000 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle — beating the record for the northern-most rhino previously set by a Yukon specimen. 

From its skull, teeth and other bones, they were able to learn a lot about it. 

The wear on its teeth showed it was in early to middle adulthood.

Natalia Rybczynski, a paleobiologist at the Museum of Nature and Carleton University who co-authored the new study, said the researchers believe the rhino was female. That's due to the small size of some lower teeth that tend to be much larger in male rhinos. 

In an artist's reconstruction, a furry rhino with wide-set nostrils and no horn stands at the edge of a lake near lilies, swans and an otter-like creature. In the background, there is a forest of pine and spruce, alongside maple, birch and alder in fall colours, and northern lights fan across the twilit sky. 

"I wanted the artist to make the rhino look like a pony in winter," said Fraser, head of paleobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

While the climate was similar to that of southern Ontario today, winters would have been snowy, and Fraser reasoned that the animal would have had to stay warm during long dark winters in its polar home.

In fact, its species name is the Inuktitut word for "frosty" or "frost" and was chosen by Jarloo Kigutak, an Inuit elder from Grise Fiord who worked with some of the paleontologists on fossil collecting trips on Devon Island and Ellesmere Island.

Fraser said the new species walked on four toes instead of the three that most rhinos used: "It's a little bit of a weirdo in that sense."

Interestingly, the fact that it didn't have a horn isn't unusual — most fossil rhinos were hornless, despite the "horned nose" name that comes from their modern descendants.

Overall, though, the new species is quite different from the dozens of fossil rhino species that roamed North America. Instead, it has been added to a genus of similar species found in Europe, Epiatheracerium.