* Astronomy

The newly described skull of the oldest woolly rhinoceros in Europe shows that these giant creatures with two impressively large horns on the bridge of their noses once roamed across central Germany. The large shaggy mammals grazed at the foot of the Kyffhäuser range, whose unforested, rocky slopes loomed out of the broad, bleak plains of northern Thuringia 460,000 years ago. The climate at this time was icy cold and far drier than today.
At the time, the brow of a glacier existed only a few kilometres away, which expanded during the Elsterian ice age from Scandinavia towards the southwest and spread across the monotonous grassland. But well adapted creatures such as mammoths, reindeer, musk ox and other cold climate animals were able to survive in what was known as the mammoth steppe and found suitable food sources here. The uniform type of vegetation that emerged under these particular climatic conditions once stretched from the coasts of the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific and extended as far as central Europe in the west.

Read more

Archaeologists in the Sverdlovsk Region in Russia's Urals have discovered the 9,000-year-old bones of a rhinoceros, a local museum worker said on Monday.
The excavations during which the bones were discovered were carried out at a site on the bank of the Lobva River, said Nikolai Yerokhin from the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, of the Ural Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
It was generally assumed that rhinoceros last wandered the Urals some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. However, the latest findings seem to prove that they existed in the area a lot more recently.

Source Novosti

Cave bears from the Carpathians as omnivorous as modern bears
Rather than being gentle giants, new research reveals that Pleistocene cave bears, a species which became extinct 20,000 years ago, ate both plants and animals and competed for food with the other contemporary large carnivores of the time such as hyaenas, lions, wolves, and our own human ancestors. The research is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA.

Read more