56 Fun Facts About Rhinoceros

Three of the five living rhino species are native to which continent?

Asia: three species survive there, though in far smaller numbers than Africa's two, which together make up the great majority of the world's rhinos.

The word 'rhinoceros' comes from Greek words meaning what?

Nose-horned: the Greek rhino- for 'nose' is the same root medicine borrowed for 'rhinoplasty', which is why a rhino and a nose job share their first five letters.

Rhino horns are made of what material?

Keratin: the same protein as hair and fingernails, with no bony core like an antelope's horn, so a rhino horn that breaks off or is trimmed above the base slowly grows back.

Like horses, rhinoceroses belong to which group of hoofed mammals?

Odd-toed ungulates: rhinos stand on three toes per foot and, like horses, ferment food in the hindgut, which lets them live on coarse, fibrous plants.

Which two rhino species have no front teeth and pluck their food with their lips instead?

Black and white: both African rhinos lack incisors altogether, while Asian rhinos keep tusk-like lower ones and fight with those more than with their horns.

Which two countries drove the market for rhino horn through the 2010s?

China and Vietnam: buyers take horn as traditional medicine and, increasingly, flaunt it as a status symbol of wealth, a demand that pushed poaching in Africa to record levels.

In which country is rhino horn prized for the handle of the jambiya, a curved dagger worn by men?

Yemen: a jambiya marks a boy's coming of age, and demand for horn hilts made the country a major market for poached horn in the 1970s and 1980s, despite an import ban in 1982.

What is the collective noun for a group of rhinoceroses?

A crash: apt for animals that can gallop at 30 miles an hour, though black rhinos usually live alone and it is the more sociable white rhino that tends to form groups.

Going by teeth, Linnaeus in 1758 grouped rhinos with which animals?

Rodents: his order Glires took in mammals with two cutting front teeth in each jaw, which filed the rhinoceros beside porcupines, hares, beavers, mice and squirrels.

Which is the smallest living rhino species?

Sumatran: also called the hairy rhino for its coat of reddish hair, it usually weighs under a tonne, and forest loss has left the survivors so scattered that they struggle to meet and breed.

Which of a rhinoceros's senses is notoriously poor?

Eyesight: a black rhino can fail to spot a person standing 30 metres off, so it leans on sharp hearing and smell, and its habit of charging at whatever startles it earned an unfair name for bad temper.

Elasmotherium, a giant Ice Age rhino, is popularly nicknamed the 'Siberian' what?

Unicorn: the nickname comes from the single huge horn it is thought to have carried, and new dating shows it survived until at least 39,000 years ago, overlapping with modern humans.

The black rhino uses its pointed, hooked upper lip mainly to feed on what?

Leaves and twigs: the black rhino is a browser, using its lip like a finger to pull acacia shoots into its mouth, and it will break down taller plants with its horn to reach more.

Why do rhinos spend so much time wallowing in mud?

To cool off and deter insects: a mud coat also works as sunscreen, because rhino skin is thick but sensitive, with blood vessels near the surface, so it burns and scars easily.

How do male rhinos check whether a female is ready to breed?

By tasting her urine: he then curls back his upper lip to draw the scent to an organ in the roof of his mouth, and may shadow a female nearing oestrus for up to 20 days.

Roughly how long does a white rhinoceros pregnancy last?

About 16 months: so long a pregnancy is a large part of why a female white rhino produces only one calf every few years.

What is an adult female rhinoceros called?

Cow: a male is a bull and the young a calf, and a cow keeps her calf at her side for two to three years, until her next one is about to arrive.

Which rhino recovered from fewer than 100 animals around 1900 to become the most numerous on Earth?

Southern white: hunted down to a few dozen animals in a single region, it was rebuilt by decades of protection and moving rhinos to new reserves, though poaching has cut numbers again since 2012.

A popular but unproven story says 'white' rhino is a mishearing of an Afrikaans word meaning what?

Wide: the tale says English speakers misheard 'wyd', describing the animal's broad mouth, but a review of Dutch and Afrikaans writing found no such usage, and the name's real origin is unknown.

The white rhino's flat, square lip is an adaptation for doing what?

Grazing grass: the broad mouth crops turf like a mower, and white rhinos clip it so short that they create 'grazing lawns' that feed smaller herbivores and act as firebreaks.

White rhinos keep returning to shared dung heaps called middens, mainly to do what?

Leave scent messages: a midden works like a noticeboard telling each visitor who else is around, and only a territorial bull kicks his dung about to advertise that the patch is his.

Black rhinos airlifted to new homes by helicopter are often flown in what position?

Upside down by their feet: a study that hung 12 tranquillised rhinos from a crane found they breathed better that way than lying on their sides, and it won a 2021 Ig Nobel Prize.

Which black rhino subspecies was declared extinct in November 2011?

West African: the IUCN's 2011 Red List update found no wild black rhinos left in West Africa, and its scientists said the outcome could have been very different had the protection they urged been put in place.

Despite their names, what colour are both black rhinos and white rhinos?

Grey: there is no colour difference between the two species, and the shade a rhino shows on any given day mostly comes from the local soil it last rolled in.

The Indian rhinoceros is also known by what name?

Greater one-horned: hunted down to fewer than 200 animals in the 20th century, it has since recovered to around 4,000 under strict protection.

Which national park is home to more than half of the world's Indian rhinos?

Kaziranga: its rhinos were nearly gone when Mary Curzon, the American-born wife of India's viceroy, visited in 1904 and urged him to protect the area, which became a reserve the next year.

The entire wild population of Javan rhinos lives in which national park?

Ujung Kulon: the park's rhinos had recovered from fewer than 30 animals in 1967, but poachers arrested in recent years confessed to killing 26, perhaps a third of those left.

What sets most female Javan rhinos apart from every other living rhino?

They have no horn: many females grow only a small knob at most, and even males carry the shortest horn of any rhino, which they rub into wallow mud more than they fight with it.

The last Javan rhino outside Indonesia was found shot with its horn cut off in which country?

Vietnam: the animal died in Cat Tien National Park, where DNA from dung had shown it was the only rhino left, and the species was declared extinct in the country in 2011.

Teleoceras, an extinct rhino with a barrel body and stubby legs, was built much like which living animal?

Hippo: the likeness is close enough that scientists still debate whether it also spent its days half-submerged in water or kept to dry land.

Despite appearances, which animals join horses as the closest living relatives of rhinos?

Tapirs: rhinos, horses and tapirs are the last three families of a once far richer order.

On which continent did rhinos die out about five million years ago, long before humans arrived?

North America: rhinos arose there about 40 million years ago and their fossils turn up from Florida to Washington state, but the last ones vanished millions of years before people reached the continent.

Other than humans, which rhinos have real predators in the wild?

Only the young: lions, hyenas and other hunters will take a calf, so mothers guard them fiercely until about age three, while a healthy adult has nothing to fear except people.

Which country holds the majority of the world's remaining rhinos?

South Africa: its herds made it the main target of the poaching wave that began in 2008, with more than 1,000 rhinos killed there every year from 2013 to 2017.

Since 1977, international trade in rhino horn has been banned under which body's rules?

CITES: the wildlife trade convention covers only trade between countries, which is how one range state's courts could reopen legal horn sales inside its own borders in 2017.

In reserves around Kruger, which measure was found to cut rhino poaching by about 78%?

Dehorning: the horn is sawn off above its growth layer, so it regrows and must be cut again, yet the same study found no such drop from tracking dogs or cameras.

The Rhino Rescue Project infuses living rhinos' horns with a bright dye and what else?

A tick-killing poison: it does not harm the rhino but can cause nausea and vomiting in anyone who eats the horn, though Save the Rhino doubts the treatment really puts buyers off.

Which country sells permits to hunt up to five black rhinos a year, with the proceeds going to conservation?

Namibia: in 2014 a Texas hunting club auctioned one such permit for $350,000 and received death threats, though only male rhinos that meet set criteria may be shot.

Which artist made a famous 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros he had never seen?

Albrecht Dürer: he worked in Germany from a written description and a sketch of an Indian rhino that had just landed in Lisbon, the first seen in Europe for more than a thousand years.

King Manuel I sent the rhinoceros of the 1515 woodcut as a gift to whom, only for it to drown?

Pope Leo X: Manuel hoped the gift would win further papal grants of territory, having first pitted the rhino against a young elephant in Lisbon, which fled at the sight of it.

Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, died in 2018 at which Kenyan conservancy?

Ol Pejeta: Sudan had been moved there from a European zoo in 2009 in the hope that a wilder life would spur breeding, and vets put him down at 45 when he could no longer stand.

How are Najin and Fatu, the last two northern white rhinos, related to each other?

Mother and daughter: Najin's father was Sudan, the last male, and with no bull left the subspecies' only hope is embryos made in the lab from stored sperm.

The last northern white rhinos live in Kenya but still belong to a zoo in which European country?

Czech Republic: the zoo at Dvůr Králové imported wild-caught northern whites in 1975 and, after decades of breeding them, flew four to Kenya in 2009 in a last bid to save the subspecies.

In Kipling's Just So Stories, what does a vengeful Parsee rub into the rhinoceros's skin while it bathes?

Cake crumbs: the rhino had eaten the Parsee's cake, so when it took off its skin to bathe, he filled it with stale, tickly crumbs and burnt currants, and the itch has spoiled its temper ever since.

In which playwright's 1959 play Rhinoceros do the people of a French town turn into rhinos one by one?

Eugène Ionesco: the stampede stands for the pull of conformity, and by the final curtain the everyman Bérenger is the last human left, vowing that he will not capitulate.

A rhinoceros of which colour became a symbol of Boston's gay community in 1974?

Lavender: the colour blends pink and blue as a merger of the feminine and masculine, and when the transit ad agency refused the cheap public-service rate, the rhino joined that year's Pride march instead.

Which French cave, discovered only in 1994, has a wall crowded with about a dozen painted rhinoceroses?

Chauvet: its drawings are more than 30,000 years old, among the oldest known anywhere, and beside the usual horses and bison they show cave lions, bears and rhinos.

In Europe, rhino horn was historically believed to have which power?

Purifying water and detecting poison: horn was supposed to fizz or bubble on contact with poison, so drinking cups carved from it were prized as protection.

Which birds ride on African rhinos, feeding on their parasites and raising the alarm when people approach?

Oxpeckers: their Swahili name means 'the rhino's guard', and a 2020 study confirmed that black rhinos heed their alarm calls, though the birds also drink blood from their hosts' wounds.

In which Roald Dahl book are the hero's parents eaten by an escaped zoo rhinoceros?

James and the Giant Peach: the rhino eats both parents on a shopping trip to London when James is four, which is how he ends up with his cruel aunts, Spiker and Sponge.

Outside India, which country is home to nearly all the world's remaining Indian rhinos?

Nepal: several hundred live in a handful of lowland national parks near the Indian border, where strict protection has rebuilt herds once hunted almost to nothing.

What is the name of the lip-curling grimace that male rhinos, horses and cats make to analyse a scent?

Flehmen response: curling the upper lip draws a scent to an extra smelling organ above the roof of the mouth, which reads pheromones, and the word is borrowed from German.

The satirical Rhinoceros Party, founded in 1963, pokes fun at election campaigns in which country?

Canada: the joke party went on to win real votes, and in 1984 its candidates drew nearly 100,000 of them.

In 1959 a zoo rhinoceros named Cacareco drew about 100,000 protest votes for the council of which Brazilian city?

São Paulo: a journalist put up the rhino, on loan from Rio's zoo, as a protest against the candidates on offer, though officials refused to accept her candidacy.

In 2017 Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, was given a profile on which app to raise funds?

Tinder: the point was not to find him a mate but to send anyone who swiped right to a donation page funding IVF research for rhinos.

Seattle start-up Pembient proposed fighting rhino poaching by flooding the market with what?

Lab-grown horn: the plan was to collapse the price until poaching no longer paid, but conservationists warned that a flood of copies could raise demand for the real thing instead.