It's a paraceratherium. Because it was extinct before humans came on the scene and perhaps because it's not cute or disneyesque, it doesn't have a common name but I think "really big rhinoceros" fills the bill. You can see from the illustration that it was enormous, much larger than any of our surviving megafauna. It dwarfs the elephant. Sixteen feet tall at the shoulder, according to Donald Prothero, the author of The Princeton Guide to Prehistoric Mammals (2017), a page-turner if there ever was one for fans of brontotheres and titanotheres. If you're reading this post in a room with an eight foot ceiling, double that and you'll get the idea of the height of a paraceratherium. Six feet taller than the rim of a basket. Not to mention the head (skull size 6.5 feet long.) Really big rhinoceros browsed the tops of trees, so that gigantic head must have been held way high in the air. The beast probably weighed somewhere in the range of fifteen to twenty tons. Unquestionably imposing.
Moreover, really big rhinoceros had a long run. It was around for about a million years until it disappeared some twenty million years ago. Changing environment, very likely. Such a huge animal and his family and friends would need a tremendous amount of forest for browse. It's hard to imagine that they had any natural enemies. Who's going to jump on a paraceratherium? On the other hand, they must have made scavengers very happy when they met their very imaginative Maker (who really outdid Himself this time).
I wish really big rhinoceros was still around. I would have liked to have seen a herd at browse. Or just listened to the thump-thump-thump of their feet as they wandered about.
We could put a few, perhaps a couple of paraceratherium cows and their babies and maybe one large bull, right out there in the back field. But how would we fence them? Or feed them, after they'd stripped the birches and the oaks? How many truckloads of hay does an adult paraceratherium eat in a day? What size barn would we need to house them during the long winter months?
On the whole, I am forced to admit that although picturesque, paraceratherium would be a very expensive, inconvenient pet.
And then there's the scat. Contemporary rhinocerotes are famous for making "communal dung piles." Did their ancestors also do so? I can imagine some truly formidable foothill-size formations.
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