by Matthew Cobb
Take a look at this photo of rock in Cappadocia, Turkey. Notice anything odd about the shape of the rock at the bottom of the picture?
If you squint at it, it looks like there are something like a pair of ears or eye-sockets. Cappadocian pareidolia? Ceratotherium neumayri. Not only does this look like it might be the head of a large mammal, it is. (Strikingly, if you want, you can see the muzzle of a beast to the right. The muzzle is pareidolia.)
According to Pierre-Olivier Antoine et al writing in PLoS ONE, this is the skull of a large extinct two-horned rhinoceros, Ceratotherium neumayri, which got stuck in a lava flow about 9.2 million years ago. Here’s the rest of their Figure 2:
The story is fascinating: in June 2010 a team of vulcanologists from Hacettepe University were out doing field work on ignimbrite…
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