Rhinoceros

48690970052_14f811ea97_k.jpg

Before seeing rhinos at Ol Pejeta, I walked into a room with all kinds of antelope, zebra, and carnivore skulls and bones on display. Right at the entrance there was a bush elephant skull positioned next to another skull of almost the same size. I knew rhinos were large, but I hadn’t realized just how gigantic they were. For some reason I had always thought of them as in the same size tier as hippopotamus, an already enormous animal. Adult southern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) are actually on average 1,000 pounds heavier than hippos, a ~33% increase!— making them the second heaviest terrestrial animal.


Rhinos belong to the order Perissodactyla, a clade containing the jungle-inhabiting tapirs of the Americas and Southeast Asia, equids (horses, zebras, and asses), as well as extinct beasts such as the indricotheres. One feature that differentiates perissodactyls from artiodactyls, as sister groups of ungulates, is how weight is distributed across the digits of their feet. Artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates) bear two enlarged digits that support the weight of the body more or less equally, while perissodactyls (odd-toed ungulates) are characterized by an enlarged central digit. In horses the outer digits are reduced, and a single hoof masks a massive central digit, in contrast to extinct equids which indeed featured tridactyly as the ancestral state. Perissodactyls, being the less diverse extant group, more easily stand out as having the unusual and “odd” digit arrangement. Seeing rhinos and tapirs in the wild, I was immediately taken in by their bizarre skull shapes, but it turns out their feet are as equally interesting.

Photographed in situ [1]

48690474918_51497bf63e_k.jpg
48690489713_f70494fb48_k (1).jpg
48691036007_7c466727d1_k.jpg
48690849841_034b040c8d_k.jpg
Critically endangered black rhino (Diceros bicornis) with onlooking helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris)
48690993582_371f84f330_k.jpg
48690487583_2752bc5017_k.jpg
48690989467_82af193d0b_k
48690465948_a934a3809a_k.jpg
48691001127_157573ca59_k.jpg
48690467828_ad9576465c_k.jpg
48690982447_28e89ddca1_k
48690967132_200fe06530_k
48690493403_d44cfa5d91_k.jpg
48691004462_6d798b8485_k.jpg
My first southern white rhino, as spotted from a distance.

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this:
close-alt close collapse comment ellipsis expand gallery heart lock menu next pinned previous reply search share star