When the newest trailer for The Mandalorian was released, a couple of shots immediately caught my attention. A huge rhino like beast suddenly appears and runs away. That creature certainly looks a lot like an Elasmotherium, a giant rhino from the Pleistocene era that lived in Eurasia.
The design of several creatures (and species) from the Star Wars-movies and -series has most certainly be influenced by fauna from our bygone age. Species such as the reek, the Cosians and the Vurk have for example been influenced by prehistoric animals. If you want to learn more about some of these designs, check out this article on the official website. That woolly beast from The Mandalorian doesn’t just appear to have been influenced by the past, it is a creature from the past!
Three different species of Elasmotherium have been catalogued, the largest being the size of a mammoth. It lived in the Pliocene and Pleistocene era (2.6 million years ago to 39.000 years ago) and it was part of the megafauna from the Pleistocene period.
Scholars believe that Elasmotherium most likely had a single, large horn. Don’t forget that horns of rhinos are made from keratin, like nails or hair, so horns of rhinos don’t fossilize. Humans most certainly encountered this creature and some may even have drawn it in caves in Europe. That art featured a single horn on a large rhino and it’s one of the reasons (another one is a frontal protuberance) that paleontologists believe that Elasmotherium had a horn. If you visit the Museum of Natural History in London, you can see a partial skull from an Elasmotherium with a model of what the horn may have looked like.
This prehistoric giant, that may even have inspired the legendary unicorn (after all, rhinos and horses are related), now seems to be very much alive in the Star Wars-universe. Let’s wait a couple of weeks to find out more about it in The Mandalorian.