When the woolly rhinoceroses roamed East Asia: a review of isotopic paleoecology of the genus Coelodonta from the Tibetan Plateau to northern Eurasia

A directly dated 14.4 ka Coelodonta antiquitatis genome constrains one late northern Eurasian individual and its population metrics; it does not establish the genus-wide or global fossil last appearance.

Coelodonta is treated as a rhinocerotid genus whose species include ecologically distinct Tibetan, East Asian and northern Eurasian samples.

For C. antiquitatis, long hair and dense underwool, a low head posture, long nasal horn and high-crowned teeth are reviewed as cold and grazing adaptations; they are not assigned unchanged to every Coelodonta species.

Northern Eurasian C. antiquitatis is supported as a typical cold-adapted grazer, whereas some C. nihowanensis isotope samples indicate mixed feeding; genus ecology is therefore variable.

The review traces Coelodonta from the Tibetan Plateau and East Asia into northern Eurasia; this is a study synthesis, not a claim that every species occupied the full range simultaneously.

The 5.08–0.0144 Ma Coelodonta display connects the reviewed earliest known C. thibetana occurrence to one directly dated 14.4 ka C. antiquitatis individual and is not a global genus FAD/LAD.