I love Krakow and I don’t really know why. Is my imagination of a Varsovian from a city scarred by history influenced by the fact that in Krakow you can feel the continuity of history and events, old tenement houses are standingand probably in many of them creak parquet floors located before World War II, or maybe I am intimidated by the majesty of Polish kings buried at Wawel, or do I believe a little that there was a Wawel dragon, He breathed fire and devoured the surrounding lambs. I don’t know where it comes from, but I love to come to Krakow at least once a year.
And since I have been to beautiful Krakow many times, I did not think that it could surprise me in such a total way. We wandered around the city and because the weather was not favorable, our trip took on more of a pub-museum character. There is no shortage of both in Krakow, so looking for places we have not seen yet, we came up with the idea of visiting the Natural History Museum of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Because it is close to the Market Square and the Planty, because what to do with time, because the tickets are ridiculously cheap and because apparently they have somemammoth briefcases. So more for a joke we went to this museum. The museum is located in a tenement house that is in no way conspicuous, you can easily pass the entrance without even a shadow of thinking that here we are passing the place where the WORLD’S ONLY COMPLETE COPY OF THE HAIRY RHINOCEROS is located. When this information reached me, although I will not say – it took some time, a bomb exploded in my head. Nowhere else in the world will you see a whole woolly rhino!! Shock! In the world, people bang on doors and windows to museums to see the skeleton of a pterodactyl, tyrannosaurus or other “saurus” reconstructed from a few bones remains, and here, under the nose in a modest museum, we have such a unique one!
Our woolly rhinoceros female is 30,000 years old. As it usually happens with great discoveries, it was found by accident. At the beginning of the twentieth century (ah, this beginning of the twentieth century is an explosion of discoveries and sciences of all kinds) in the vicinity of Starunia, a tiny village located 30 km from Stanislaviv and 130 km from Lviv, the construction of drilling wells for the extraction of earth wax began. Workers working on the shafts stumbled upon the body of what they mistook for an ox. Some surprise was aroused by quite large horns of the animal, but the explorers did not spend much time wondering why such strange horns. The animal’s scum was extracted, and the workers took pieces of skin to make soles. In the end, however, the strange appearance of the animal aroused someone’s curiosity and fortunately, in a fairly short time, Lviv and Krakow scientists took up the excavation. A scientific commission immediately stopped mining work in the area and began to examine the remains found. It turned out that our female rhino was not quite alone. First, the remains of a mammoth and another woolly rhinoceros were found. Police secured the scene and tried to recover the missing pieces of skin. How good was the skin of the animal if it was necessary to get involved in the subject of judgment. In October 1907, the district court in Nadwórna decided that “A part of the mammoth skin, unearthed in Starunia and taken away by the local court, is sent back”. Probably the missing pieces of skin came from the remains of a mammoth, and another incomplete rhinoceros body was recovered only on November 6, 1907 from a depth of 17.5 meters. Both finds were originally placed in the Dzieduszycki Museum in Lviv (today’s Natural History Museum of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences). The outbreak of World War I stopped the work, it was resumed only in 1929 under the supervision of professors Jan Nowak and Kazimierz Kostanecki.
This time, the complete body of a rhinoceros was recovered. Before the find could be safely prepared for transport, the railway lora on which the body was tried to be laid broke twice. No wonder, scientists estimate that an adult individual of the woolly rhino reached a height of 2 meters, a length of 5 meters and weighed up to 3.5 tons.
The body was transported to Krakow and there the preparation of the find was carried out. A well- preserved skin was removed from the animal, a skeleton was prepared, plaster casts of the body were made in the position in which it was found. Only the hooves and two powerful horns of the animal have not been preserved. Unfortunately, for so many years, the rhino almost completely went bald, only pieces of skin covered with hair have been preserved. But you can see a few dissected internal organs– tongue, palate, trachea, a piece of the ear.
Such a great condition of the find is due to the preservative properties of brine and earth wax (ozokerite) deposits. Of course, it is not known what happened that in one place several animals died and our rhino found itself in such a noble group of other giants. As one of the Krakow professors supposed, the sudden death of animals could have been caused by a violent spring storm, the river overflowed and surprised the grazing herd. Due to their size, they are not extremely agile animals, so the current of the river carried them away and then the fuzzy ground covered the animals.
During World War II, the German occupiers planned to deport the rhinoceros. They did not make it, the specimen weighing 900 kg was lowered from the room on the 3rd floor to the cellars and there it lived to see the end of the war covered with sandbags. The Germans only managed to make a plaster cast, which can still be seen in the Natural History Museum “Haus der Natur” in Salzburg. The cast is covered with artificial fur.
Below I give some scientific data about hairy rhinos taken from the website of the Natural History Museum. Our copy was radiocarbon dated in 1971 and 1974 and its age was estimated at 30,000 years. In the museum descriptions you will find dating to 40,000 years.
The woolly rhinoceros Coelodonta antiquitatis is an extinct species of mammal that occurred throughout Eurasia during the late Pleistocene, from the Pyrenees to Siberia. Next to the woolly mammoth, it was the largest herbivore of the Ice Age. The woolly rhinoceros fed mainly on grass and lichens. The adult specimen reached a height of about 2 m, a length of over 5 m and weighed about 3.5 tons. Thick coat and thick, long hair covering the body provided him with good protection against heat loss during the harsh winters prevailing during glaciations. The head tapering forward was equipped with two powerful horns.
Do not forget about the remains of the mammoth, they are also in the same museum (Mammuthus primigenius), although incomplete they are still impressive. Several fragments of mammoth skulls have been preserved. One of them was found near the village of Bzianka near Rzeszów. The skull was dated to 14,000 years old. The second one is older and is 25,000 years old and comes from the vicinity of Dębica, it was dug in the Wisłok River.
I hope that you will visit the modest museum by the way. If I haven’t convinced you yet, it’s worth knowing that a copy of the cast of our rhino can be found in museums in France, England, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Japan. All these museums are very proud to have such a cast. And with us the original. And don’t be discouraged by the very long name of the Krakow museum – look for the Natural History Museum of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences.