The Sumatran rhinoceros is a rare member of the family Rhinocerotidae. It is the only extant species of the genus Dicerorhinus. Members of the species once inhabited rainforests, swamps, and cloud forests. They are now critically endangered, with only five substantial populations in the wild: four in Sumatra and one in Borneo.
About Sumatran rhinoceros in brief
The Sumatran rhinoceros is a rare member of the family Rhinocerotidae. It is the only extant species of the genus Dicerorhinus. Members of the species once inhabited rainforests, swamps, and cloud forests in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. They are now critically endangered, with only five substantial populations in the wild: four in Sumatra and one in Borneo. The species was completely extirpated from Malaysia in 2019, and one of the Sum atran populations may already be extinct. There are fewer than 80 left in existence. According to the World Wildlife Fund, their numbers are 30. The Indonesian ministry of Environment, began an official counting of the Sumatran rhino in February 2019, planned to be completed in three years. The specific epithet sumatrensis signifies Sumatra, the Indonesian island where the rhinos were first discovered. The rhino is the most vocal rhino species and also communicates through marking soil with its feet, twisting saplings into patterns, and leaving excrement. It has two horns; the larger is the nasal horn, typically 15–25 cm, while the other horn is typically a stub. The only remaining rhinos are in national parks, mostly in Western Australia, which has only 75 remaining rhino remaining. The three subspecies are: Didermocerus sibiricus, Diceronus cerous, and Diceran rhino sibilis.
The last remaining Dicerarhinus rhino, known as the Western rhinos, has 75 remaining parks, most of which are national parks. It was first recorded in 1793, and is now considered to be locally extinct in that country, and only survives in Indonesia. In March 2016, a Sumat Ran rhino was spotted in Indonesian Bornea. The first documented Sumatan rhinOCeros was shot 16 km outside Fort Marlborough, near the west coast of Sumatra,. Drawings of the animal, and a written description, were sent to the naturalist Joseph Banks, then president of the Royal Society of London, who published a paper on the specimen that year. In 1814, the species was given a scientific name by Johann Fischer von Waldheim. The current name is Dicer or Cerhinus, which comes from the Greek terms di, cero, and cero, which means “to mark” or “to leave” The species is a mostly solitary animal except for courtship and offspring-rearing. There is little or no information about procedures that would assist in ex situ breeding. Though a number of rhinos died once at the various destinations and no offspring were produced for nearly 20 years, the rhino were all doomed in their soon-to-be-logged forest. In 1868, John Edward Gray Gray proposed the name DicerOrhinus for the species.
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This page is based on the article Sumatran rhinoceros published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
