The woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis Blumenbach 1799) is an extinct species of rhinoceros that lived in the Pleistocene in Europe and Asia. Until about 40 ka (thousand years) it was geographically widespread in Eurasia, including Poland, preferring areas of cold stepotundra. The woolly rhinoceros, along with the other large herbivore, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), is a key component of the megafauna, or more or less cold-adapted large mammals of the Pleistocene. From the perspective of the results of studies of these taxa, knowledge of their history varies greatly with the surprising underestimation of studies of the woolly rhinoceros in the face of the significant abundance of its remains in the fossil record. In particular, unlike the mammoth, little is known about the timeframe of the woolly rhinoceros’ occurrence in central and western Europe, including Poland. There are no DNA results available for the woolly rhinoceros from Poland, and very few from Europe. The nature of the presence of the woolly rhinoceros in Europe is either discontinuous or its continuity is unrecognized due to the lack of sufficiently high resolution radiocarbon dating results, as indicated by the presence of significant gaps in radiocarbon dating results (including around 40-34 ka BP (before present)). The date of the extinction of the woolly rhinoceros in Eurasia is about 14,000 years ago BP, but the timing of its extinction in different places on the continent is poorly understood. Hence, it is unclear whether the extinction was simultaneous or gradual in different parts of Europe. The end period of the woolly rhinoceros in Europe is also important for assessing the size, condition and stability of its population, and raises the question of whether it was as genetically diverse as the population in Eastern Europe.

In the proposed project, we will aim to resolve these questions by studying woolly rhinoceros remains from Poland, the North Sea and selected European countries (Germany, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Romania, Moldova and Russia). To this end, we plan to collect archival data and scan the entire area of Poland in search of sites with its remains, and studies have been designed for the taxonomic designation of the remains, determination of the age of death, sex differentiation, bone and skull measurements, determination of pathological changes in relation to past diseases or injuries, determination of the absolute age of the remains by radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis. In addition, the analysis of any traces that have been recorded on the surface of rhinoceros woolly rhino remains will make it possible to determine the factors in the accumulation of rhinoceros remains at Polish sites, to what extent these were natural and to what extent anthropogenic. A reliable assessment of the human impact on the remains should lead to the determination of the human-horn rhino relationship, hitherto unknown in Polish research. The obtained and integrated results will be the first synthetic history of the woolly rhinoceros in Poland, which will be published after 60 years since the last presentation of the state of knowledge. The tangible end result of the Polish research will be the creation of a database on the Pleistocene woolly rhinoceros of Poland (WOOLRHINOPOLI). We expect that the compilation of existing data on the woolly rhinoceros from other European countries, together with our planned radiocarbon and DNA studies and their integration with Polish results, will contribute to presenting the chronological and demographic history of the species in central and western Europe, assessing the relationship between the species’ distribution range and population size and genetic diversity, and determining the nature of the woolly rhinoceros’ extinction process at the end of the Pleistocene.