General Article Only two northern white rhinos remain, and they’re both female – here’s how we could make more

Topic Selected: Endangered & Extinct Species Book Volume: 402
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Only two northern white rhinos remain, and they’re both female – here’s how we could make more

White rhinos owe their name to the Afrikaans word ‘wyd’, meaning wide, which refers to the animal’s wide mouth. Vladislav T. Jirousek/Shutterstock

Ruth Appeltant, University of Oxford and Suzannah Williams, University of Oxford

There were fewer than 100 southern white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum simum) a century ago. Today, there are over 20,000. Sadly, this success story only stretches as far as the southern subspecies of the white rhino. With the death of the last male in 2018, the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) has passed the point where it can be saved naturally. With only two females remaining, the subspecies is now classed as functionally extinct.

Historical distributions of the northern (red) and southern (green) white rhino. Tunstall et al 2018, CC BY

This is a poignant, but not entirely hopeless, situation. New techniques, such as in vitro fertil...

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