![]() ![]() ![]() “This is Ratu,” whispered Zulfi as we approached a large enclosure, “and this is our hope, Andatu”. A pair of Sumatran rhinos at the Way Kambas National Park in Indonesia. Photo Courtesy: Vivek Menon Rarest of the Rare Its northern subspecies teeters on the brink with two females and a male. Only the southern population of the white rhino remains secure at over 30,000 individuals. There are over 3,500 Indian and Nepalese greater one-horned rhinos and around 5,000 black rhinos. These two Indonesian rhinos today number less than a hundred each. But it remained a creature of the forest much like the black and the Javan rhinos. The smaller woolly rhino that had evolved in tropical climes shed most of its hair and became the Sumatran rhino. The woolly rhino of Tibet was one that went extinct. With the pressure to find food, competition from elephants and predation from giant hyaenas, rhinos gradually started becoming rarer and rarer. Its contemporary elephantoid was the woolly mammoth and around 10,000 years ago both would have been common in a wide Eurasian swathe.īut then came an age when temperatures fluctuated wildly, the first age of global warming, and much of the rhinos’ food went extinct. While most of the world was ice-free at that time, Tibet would still have had a lot of ice and the woolly rhino spread into Europe towards the west and Indonesia towards the south. The woolly rhino may have evolved in Tibet in dry, open plains with a lot of shrubs to browse on, and resembled modern rhinos in having horns, in fact two of them, placed one behind the other (older models had tried placing both horns next to each other as well, but they died out). They did well around the time the woolly rhino evolved and there were more than a dozen species of rhinos living at that time. These animals probably went extinct sometime after another giant started evolving: the elephant.Īlthough the giant rhinos lost out to elephants (which won as they had evolved with a new adaptation that the rhinos did not have – a trunk!) other rhinos moved from being primarily forest animals to becoming adapted to grasslands. Over the years, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, some of them grew distinctly huge and probably reached a climax in size in the now extinct gigantic Paraceratherium, a 4.5 m. That was almost 25 million years after the evolution of the first rhino-like animals probably in that chunk of Africa that much later broke off and became India! These were the first tapir-like creatures, with affinities to pigs and to zebras. Now, if you believe a certain lot of scientists, the ancestor of the Sumatran rhino split off from the ancestors of the other four living species of rhinos around 25 million years ago. And they took me all the way back to the last woolly rhinos the world had seen 10,000 years ago in the Eurasian Steppe. Last month I managed to spend a few hours with the latter, the few that are held in captivity in the Way Kambas National Park in Indonesia. So all that was left for me to experience on the extant rhino platter was the Javan rhino (by all accounts a miniaturised version of the Indian rhino) and the very, very rare Sumatran two-horned rhino. And then, the couple of decades of familiarity with our own one-horned armoured tank of a rhino in the swamps of Kaziranga, which further clinched my feeling of Auld Lang Syne, for surely the armour-plated look of our beast makes it seem a few centuries older than any other. Many an hour has also been spent in private holdings of white rhinos in southern Africa, watching the very opposite evolution that has happened to their upper lip – from pointy and hooked to a broad, wedge-like flange. Helping move black rhinos from Nairobi National Park to Tsavo in Kenya in the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity of closely examining that hooked upper lip that makes them more browsers than grazers. ![]() I have done this through much of my life and have spent considerable time with three of the five species that survive today, marvelling at their 50 million-year-old model of mega-herbivory. Or else you could roam prehistory in their unflustered, unhurried company. Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, I’ll stare at something less prepoceros.” Let your eyes wander over a rhino’s anatomy its thick leathery skin, beady eyes, lumbering bulk and that epitome of being a rhinoceros, a horned nose, and you could sympathise with Ogden Nash when he wrote: “The rhino is a homely beast, for human eyes he’s not a feast. If you spend any time looking at the few that survive today you are struck by their antiquity. ![]()
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