8 Interesting Facts About Rhinoceroses

1) A Rhino’s horn’s structure resembles a horse’s hooves. The outside is composed of soft keratin, not unlike hair and fingernails, while at its center there are dense deposits of melanin and calcium. If the horn breaks off, the rhino can grow a new one.

2) People have treasured rhino horns throughout known history. The horns have been carved into paperweights and hairpins, cups and dagger handles with its translucent beauty highly prized by artisans. It has also historically been prized for its supposed medicinal qualities and even today in places like China, India and Malaysia, rhino horns are ground and used to treat a variety of ailments including fever, headache, gout, rheumatism and food poisoning. Although extensive research has been done to try to verify the medicinal value of a rhinohorn, only one has shown even a slight correlation between rhino horn and improved health.

3) Just how valuable, monetarily speaking, is a rhino horn? In some places, such as Vietnam, a large rhino horn can run you one quarter to a half million dollars U.S. Because the horn is so valuable at present, many think the only way to stop poaching is to simply try to domesticate the rhino as much as possible and begin farming them for their horns, which would simultaneously drive down the price of a horn and establish a legal market for it. Infact, in some areas, to potentially save the rhino from poachers, the rhinos are incapacitated, then have their horn removed, effectively making them temporarily safe from poachers until the horn grows back. Full grown rhinos, even without their horn, are pretty much at the top of the food chain, besides humans, so some find this to be an acceptable way to try to stop poaching and preserve the rhino. Although, removing the horn does potentially cause problems with its ability to defend itself from other rhinos.

4) For the ancients, the rhino horn was thought to hold magical properties, such as the ability to purify water or be used to detect poisons in drinks. Surprisingly, the latter quality may be true. Because of the horn’s composition, today some believe that strongly alkaline poisons may have produced a chemical reaction inside a cup made from the horn.

5) There are random facts that Africa is home to both species of white, as well as the black, rhino, although the former isn’t white and the latter isn’t black (they’re really both grey or yellowish-grey, looking very similar). In fact, the main distinction between the two species is that black rhinos’ mouths are designed for eating foliage, while white rhinos’ lips are broad and flat, better for grazing. So why are they called “black” and “white” rhinos? For black rhinos, they were simply called this to distinguish them from white rhinos. For white rhinos, nobody knows for sure, but it’s thought that perhaps they were originally named this after the Afrikaans “wyd”, meaning “wide”, so not in reference to their color, but their broad, flat mouths. The theory goes that this then morphed into “white” in English.

6) An adult rhino’s skin can be as much as 5 cm (2 inches) thick, with typical range of thickness across species being 1.5-5 cm thick.

7) “Rhinoceros”, the name, comes from the Ancient Greek “ῥῑνόκερως”, meaning “horn nose”.

8) Rhinos first popped up around 50 million years ago, probably branching off from the Hyracodontidae family of animals. This group looked a bit like horses with the smallest around the size of a dog and the largest, Paraceratherium, thought to be the largest land mammal in history at 16 feet tall at their shoulder height, 26 ft long, and 18 tons in weight.