![]() With a poaching onslaught of massive proportions sweeping across Africa and Asia, those of us who care about these rapidly vanishing pachyderms have been in a state of unhappy anticipation of precisely this sort of news story. So why all the confusion? Perhaps because extinction stories involving rhinos are just what we’ve been expecting. Just in the past week, it’s reappeared in countless social media posts and more than one news article (see here, here and here). A few years later (in 2011), it was official: the IUCN, the world’s ultimate authority on the conservation status of living things, sounded the extinction knell by declaring that the western black rhino ( Diceros bicornis longipes) had vanished off the face of the earth.īut unlike the rhino itself, the news story of its 2011 extinction keeps coming back to life. An extensive survey carried out all the way back in 2006 failed to unearth any signs of it – no spoor, no dung, no signs of feeding. 9: 3–5.The western black rhinoceros is extinct … and it’s been extinct for some time now. ![]() "The existing basis for subspecies classification of black and white rhino" (PDF). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. "The mammals of the tenth edition of Linnaeus: an attempt to fix the types of the genera and the exact bases and localities of the species". "Review of the European perception of the African Rhinoceros" (PDF). "The extinct Cape Rhinoceros, Diceros bicornis bicornis (Linnaeus, 1758)" (PDF). American Society of Mammalogists (455): 1–8. This synonymy, based upon du Toit (1987) was, however, considered erroneous by Groves and Grubb (2011). bicornis bicornis, the latter is listed as "vulnerable" instead of "extinct". This subspecies was restricted to well-vegetated regions, in contrast to others that are well adapted to desertic conditions.Īs the IUCN considers the living northern Namibian black rhino populations ( D. The limbs were short but slender and the skin folds were probably only weakly pronounced. ![]() The skull was the largest of any known subspecies and proportionally large compared to the body. While the differentiation of subspecies is mostly based on skull and body proportions, as well as details of the dentition, the external appearance of the southern subspecies is not exactly known because no photos exist. bicornis bicornis was the largest of all black rhino subspecies. Later this subspecies became frequently mistaken for the south-western black rhinoceros, but the latter has to be considered a separate subspecies ( D. Therefore, this population formed the base of the nominal subspecies of the black rhinoceros. Thomas declared the Cape of Good Hope as type locality of D. It was even proposed that it was indeed the skull of an Indian rhino ( Rhinoceros unicornis) with a faked second horn, as Linnaeus erroneously noted India as occurrence. It is unknown from where the original specimen (the holotype), on which Carl Linnaeus based "Rhinoceros" bicornis in 1758, was collected. ![]() This former species was brought to extinction by excessive hunting and habitat destruction around 1850. Zoos, animal sanctuaries and conservation centers use this same scientific name as an indicating reference to the surviving south-central black rhinoceros. The southern black rhinoceros, southern hook-lipped rhinoceros or Cape rhinoceros ( Diceros bicornis bicornis) is an extinct subspecies of the black rhinoceros that was once abundant in South Africa from the Cape Province to Transvaal, southern Namibia, and possibly also Lesotho and southern Botswana. bicornis bicornis approximal historical range (ca. ![]()
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