Rhinos one of few speces to survive

I HAVE always been fascinated by the large animals that roamed the world during and just after the last Ice Age.

I’m also intrigued by the arguments over when and why they became extinct. These animals, mostly mammals but including some birds and reptiles, are called the Pleistocene megafauna by zoologists.

Probably the best known ones from northern Europe and Asia are the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. Mammoths were not quite as large as people imagine – slightly shorter than an Asian elephant, which itself is smaller than an African bush elephant, but heavier because they had a stocky build to help them withstand the cold. For the same reason they had much smaller ears and a thick coat of fur up to a metre long.