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Histories of Northamptonshire
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Woolly Rhinoceros Bone

Between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago Geologic to Prehistoric

This ulna (leg bone) comes from a woolly rhinocerus that lived in Northamptonshire during the Pliocene and Pleistocene ice Age.

Leg bone of a woolly rhinocerous from Wollaston, Northamptonshire. © NMAG
Leg bone of a woolly rhinocerous from Wollaston, Northamptonshire.
Woolly Rhino on display at Weston Park Museum, Sheffield © Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)
Woolly Rhino on display at Weston Park Museum, Sheffield

This ulna (leg) bone from a woolly rhinoceros was found in Wollaston Quarry in 1995 and is evidence of the county's fauna during the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs, during the time of the ice age, from 5.3 million to 11,700 years ago when both woolly mammoths and rhinos roamed across Northamptonshire.

The woolly rhino was massive. It stood about 1.8 metres tall even though it had short stocky legs and was about 4.5 metres from the tip of it's snout to the end of its tail. Its body was covered with a thick reddish-brown fur. An adult rhino weighed up to 1.5 to 2 metric tons, the equivalent of two Volkswagen Beetles. The rhino’s most distinctive feature was the horn on top of it's snout which was about 91 centimetres tall and the smaller horn near its eyes.

Evidence suggests that they were not hunted to extinction by humans, but likely died out from sudden climate changes brought on during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, a period that saw the rapid retreat of the Pleistocene ice sheets starting about 14,700 years ago.

Number 6 of the objects selected for the A History of Northamptonshire in 100 Objects Exhibition 2025

Wollaston
Contributed by NMAG
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