The bones are discoloured with age and broken into hundreds of pieces. But when laid side by side, the fragments reveal the outline of a mighty beast \u2013 a rhinoceros \u2013 that roamed Canada\u2019s High Arctic roughly 23 million years ago. <\/p>\n
Long before the caribou, polar bear and musk ox emerged as icons of Canada\u2019s northern wilderness, the rhinos were there, munching their way across a surprisingly verdant landscape while aurora borealis danced overhead. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s the picture that emerges from the first comprehensive analysis of a rhinoceros skeleton unearthed in stages from the permafrost on Devon Island in Nunavut. <\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Epiatheracerium itjilik, as imagined in ancient Nunavut with other animals whose fossils have been found there. The seal-like mammal in the water, Puijila darwini, spent most of its time walking on land.Julius Csotonyi<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Labels on the rhino\u2019s remains note their origin on Devon Island, part of the Arctic archipelago.Dave Chan\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Details about the fossil, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution<\/a>, show it to be a member of the rhino genus Epiaceratherium. However, it is a distinct species within that group, which researchers who conducted the analysis at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa have dubbed itjilik\u201a an Inuktitut word that translates as \u201cfrosty.\u201d<\/p>\n What could prove controversial about the find is the team\u2019s conclusion that the rhino\u2019s nearest known relatives lived in Europe \u2013 a result that implies its ancestors crossed into the Canadian Arctic using a North Atlantic land bridge during the early Miocene period. <\/p>\n While such a bridge is known to have existed at much earlier times, the conventional view is that the connection was severed tens of millions of years before the rhinos could have arrived by that route. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Modern rhinos come from Africa \u2013 like the eastern black rhino ancestors of this baby at a Cleveland zoo \u2013 or from Asia. Their ancient European cousins are long extinct.Sue Ogrocki\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n \u201cImmediately I thought, this doesn\u2019t make any sense,\u201d said Danielle Fraser, the museum\u2019s head of paleobiology and the lead author of the study. <\/p>\n Yet, she said, after a detailed modelling of itjilik\u2019s family tree and a review of current research, she found support for the possibility that a dry land connection between Europe and Canada \u201cpersisted longer than we thought.\u201d<\/p>\n The result, she added, reflects the emerging importance of the region as a cradle of mammalian evolution at a time when the Arctic climate was significantly warmer than it is today.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re a biodiversity scientist, you think about the tropics as the area that\u2019s so important for evolution,\u201d Dr. Fraser said. \u201cBut when we look to mammals in the past, the Arctic just seems to be the centre for diversification and dispersal.\u201d<\/p>\n Devon Island is so desolate that NASA scientists have done field expeditions there, like this one in 2000, to get a sense of what life on Mars might be like. Haughton Crater adds to the unearthly aura of the place.<\/p>\n Bob Weber\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n The story of itjilik begins many thousands to millions of years before the fossil itself, when a small asteroid slammed into Devon Island\u2019s ancient shale bed, excavating a deep crater more than 20 kilometres across.<\/p>\n Today that depression, known as the Haughton impact crater, resembles a giant quarry in the midst of barren plains that cover the world\u2019s largest uninhabited island. But when the strike happened, Devon Island was home to a temperate forest that would have looked more like the environs around Ottawa today. The crater became a lake with abundant wildlife hugging its shoreline.<\/p>\n It was in this setting that the rhino lived and died, leaving its bones buried in muddy silt that remained hidden as the land grew colder and drier. Eventually the planet descended into an ice age, and glaciers permanently covered the area for vast stretches of time.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n The saxifrage on today Devon Island is a far cry from the greenery that existed here millions of years ago.Bob Weber\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n In 1984, Mary Dawson, a pioneering Arctic paleobiologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, was exploring a small valley in the Haughton crater when she spotted what turned out to be a piece of rhinoceros tooth embedded in the sediment. Two years later she returned and collected a large number of bones, including parts of the skull and jaws from the same location.<\/p>\n Between 2007 and 2010, successive Canadian Museum of Nature expeditions led by Natalia Rybczynski collected more bones at the site while working alongside Dr. Dawson, who was then in her 80s. \u201cIt was like she was playing in her own backyard,\u201d said Marisa Gilbert, who participated in the expedition and would later spend years assembling the rhino bone fragments back in Ottawa.<\/p>\n The repeat visits were crucial, Dr. Rybczynski said, because of the process known as cryoturbation, a gradual overturning of the soil due to the freeze-thaw cycle. \u201cWe can go back to the same spot and new bones will have grown up out of the sediment,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Mary Dawson and Dr. Rybczynski, prospecting for fossils at the Haughton Crater in 2010, would make many trips to Devon Island as the thawing earth gave up more bones.<\/p>\n Courtesy of Canadian Museum of Nature<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Having a mostly complete skeleton means Marisa Gilbert and her colleagues have more details to compare against other species of ancient mammals.Dave Chan\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n In total, about three-quarters of the rhino\u2019s bones have been recovered, making it an unusually complete skeleton. This helped to locate it within the rhino evolutionary tree. The bones show the rhino was a mature adult that stood about 1.5 metres at the shoulder. Based on the tusks of the lower jaw, the specimen could have been a female, but that is not certain without a male fossil for comparison, Dr. Fraser said. Like most ancestral members of the rhinoceros family, there is no evidence the creature sported a nasal horn like those associated with African rhinos today.<\/p>\n A further trove of biological information was published earlier this year, <\/a>when it was revealed that enamel proteins were successfully extracted from one of the rhino\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n But the key question is how the rhino came to be there, on the banks of a Canadian crater lake 23 million years ago, and whether its evolutionary story involves a bridge to Europe. Such an idea is \u201cpure fantasy and conflicts with all geological evidence,\u201d said Philip Sexton, a paleoceanographer and senior lecturer at Britain\u2019s Open University in Milton Keynes who was cited in the Ottawa team\u2019s study.<\/p>\n But other clues, including a study of ancient oak tree pollen in Iceland<\/a>, suggest the idea may not be so far-fetched. What would counter the idea would be the discovery of related rhinoceros fossils in northern Asia, which could indicate an alternative pathway to North America via the Bering land bridge, which is known to have existed at that time. <\/p>\n Even more tantalizing is the possibility that something more definitive may await discovery in the Haughton crater and other High Arctic sites in Canada that have yet to be explored. \u201cThe interesting thing is that the only large mammal that we have from the crater is the rhino,\u201d Dr. Fraser said, noting that the Miocene was populated by an abundance of large mammals, including camels and horses. \u201cWhere are they? I feel like they were there and I feel like we\u2019re going to find them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Dave Chan\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n The science of life: More from Ivan SemeniukThe Decibel podcast <\/p>\n When one group of scientists declared they had found a new type of mososaur,<\/a> another in Alberta called it a fake. Ivan Semeniuk spoke with The Decibel<\/a> about the feud and the process that might settle it in 2026. Subscribe for more episodes.<\/a><\/p>\n On nature<\/p>\n Genetic study shines light on Toronto\u2019s ancient \u2018subway deer\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n