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Description
When the Europeans have arrived in Africa and Asia, they have met people and animals that they had not seen since the ancient times, including such formidable creatures as the so-called pachyderms – the elephant, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. Superficially similar to each other, each of them stands apart from the other two and every other beast of dry land; each of them has its own story to tell, and these are their stories.

1) The elephant. The biggest of all land beasts, the elephant cuts a familiar and formidable figure, from the grey and wrinkly skin, to the massive ears, to the dexterous trunk, composed of 100 000 muscles on average, to the infamous tusks, the source of ivory that had killed many of these formidable beasts.

Nowadays, what people often do not realize, there are three species of elephant. The most astounding and well known, is the African bush elephant. This is the elephant that was used by Hannibal in the Second Punic War against the Roman republic, and it is the one threatened the most by the ivory trade as it got the largest tusks.

It lives mostly in Eastern and Central Africa, mostly in the savannah and the bushland, hence the name ‘bush’. The females and the calves live in herds, but the bull elephants live on their own (the same is true for all of the modern elephants). They feed on any sort of vegetation that they can pick up with their dextrous trunks or bring down with their mammoth weight, and contrary to the popular opinion, they can be domesticated and trained, just as their foreign relatives can be – but it is not too economically viable in the modern times, so they do not.

The other species of the African elephant is the so-called forest elephant because it lives in jungles of Western and Central Africa. It is shorter than the bush elephant is – the bush elephant and its trunk can reach almost as high as a giraffe’s neck can – smaller and has differently shaped ears and different sort of ivory in their tusks. This enabled the scientists to figure out that this mammal is not a subspecies of the bush elephant, but is its’ own beast.

The different lifestyles that the two African creatures live reflect on their appearance. The forest elephant’s habitat is not as seasonal as the bush elephant’s – there is always something green to chew upon, and there is always plenty of moisture. Consequently, they do not migrate as far and as wide as the bush elephant does, and their diet includes much more fruit than the bush elephant’s. Sadly, it still comes into conflict with humans, not so much over ivory, as in case of the bush elephant, but because humans are destroying the African jungle – the forest elephant’s habitat.

The Asian elephant, as far as elephants go, is smaller than the African, especially in its tusks and ears. Its’ skull is shorter and its trunk is built differently too. Just like the African forest elephant, the Asian elephant (also sometimes called the Indian elephant in the past), lives primarily in the forest, but sometimes it comes upon the plantations of humans, which it raids. (The African elephants do something similar as well.) This does not endear the Asian elephant to the people, who sometimes capture the animal in question and raise them to become beasts of labour; Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” duology and adult stories occasionally dwell on this topic; Hathi of “The Jungle Book” is an Asian elephant, of course.

Speaking of Kipling, much of what “The Jungle Book” tells about the elephant-human interaction in Asia is correct; unlike the Europeans, the North Africans and the Middle Easterners, the Hindus often used war elephants in their wars; but just as the Carthaginians have discovered, war elephants are not super-weapons of any sort, and can be defeated rather handily by other armies – this is one of the reasons why the ordinary cavalry had survived for so long, and war elephants did not.

Another reason, of course, is that an elephant requires much more food than a donkey, a horse, or even a camel – not just because it is bigger, but also because its’ digestive system is less effective. Elephants may have hoof-like toes, but they are not ungulates (mammals with hooves), they are called proboscideans, when scientists want to combine them with their distant extinct cousins, such as the American mastodon, or paengulates, “near ungulates”, a name that the elephants sometimes share with their evolutionary cousins, and those cousins are as different from the elephants as mammals can be.

Cousin number one is the hyrax – a small, furry mammal that looks more like a guinea pig than, well, an elephant. There are several species of these mammals – some live among the rocks, others – in trees. They look like rodents, but got more of an attitude, as sometimes they try to counterattack a predator that is harassing them. They live in families, but are less efficient diggers than the true rodents are.

And the other cousin branch is the ‘sea cows’, the dugong and the manatees. Shaped half like whales and half like walruses, these creatures have retained hoof-like nails on their front flippers, and male dugongs actually have small tusks, just as the bull elephants do. They are the biggest mammals in the seas that eat plants (primarily sea grass), and unlike the whales, the dolphins, and the bigger seals (walrus, elephant seal, fur seals and sea lions), they do not go into open, deeper water, but stay in coastal shallows; the manatees actually live in rivers rather than in the seas.

Either way, the elephants, the hyraxes and the sea cows are all less efficient digesters than other herbivores are, and have rather robust, chunky bodies to house large stomachs and guts; between that and the moustaches its’ anyone’s guess who the sea cows could’ve inspired the seductive mermaid myth – but that is the sea cows’ problems; the elephants hadn’t inspired any seductive myths, but they are thoughtful and intelligent creatures, very popular among fans of zoos and circuses, which makes them different from their neighbours, such as the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros.

2) The hippopotamus. Whereas the African bush elephant is the biggest mammal on Africa’s land, the hippopotamus is the biggest beast in Africa’s rivers. It is much more low-slung than the elephants and the rhinoceroses are, but its jaws open far wider than those of the elephants’ or of the rhinoceroses. This is important to know, for the hippopotamus not only just a gape big enough to bite a human in two, it got the fiery hair trigger temper to motivate it, and that is one of the main reasons why no one ever tried taming or domesticating a hippopotamus.

The other main reason, of course, is that the hippopotamus’s skin might look thick, but it is still very vulnerable to the sweltering African sun: a hippopotamus may overheat, dehydrate, or oth-erwise perish if it stays on land for too long. It may also be attacked, not just be people, but also by prides of lions, who, by working together, can be large enough, and strong enough, to overwhelm not just hippopotamuses, but also young and juvenile African bush elephants.

In the African rivers, however, the hippopotamus rules the roost, as it is powerful enough as well as sufficiently armed, to bite in two not just a Nile crocodile, but also a bull shark, if it comes far enough upstream. Hippopotamuses eat, sleep, defecate, mate, nurse, even get groomed (by local fish) underwater, though they still fall short of the extent that their close cousins do – but then again, their close cousins are cetaceans, dolphins and whales.

For a while it was assumed that hippopotamuses belonged to the artiodactyl family, to mammals with an even number of toes/hooves – i.e. the deer, the antelope, the camel, etc. More precisely, it was assumed that because the hippopotamus did not ruminate as the deer and the antelope do, it was more closely related to the wild pigs: an idea that was further reinforced by the behavior of the other species of hippopotamus – the pygmy hippopotamus.

This little-known creature spends much more of its time on land than in the water, sometimes even sleeping in burrows – but then again, it lives in African rainforests, where the climate is much damper, less sunny, and there are not too many large predators unlike in the African savannahs and large freshwater bodies. The pygmy hippopotamus is also much shyer and less obvious or loud than the ordinary hippopotamus is, and its behavior is similar to the behavior of the wild pigs.

As a consequence, many people believed that hippopotamuses were related to swine, until DNA and other tests were made, where it was revealed that hippopotamuses are much more closely related to the dolphins and the whales, rather than to the artiodactyls. More precisely, the hippopotamuses and the cetaceans have ancestors that are more closely related to each other, than to other kinds of mammals – pigs, antelope, deer, horses, elephants, etc. This sort of evolutionary relationship makes hippopotamuses very aquatic animals, but unlike the whales or the dolphins they are not particularly intelligent, but they are particularly belligerent, so they best be left alone, whether in water or on land...something that may be hard to do. Much of Africa is seasonal, subject to periods of plenty and drought, and when the latter happens, when food and water becomes scarce in the wild, this is when people and hippopotamuses begin to run into each other with bad results for both sides. (The same goes for the African bush elephant as well.)

The hippopotamus, unlike the pygmy hippopotamus, is a belligerent and aggressive creature; it got the strength, the jaws, and the teeth in its jaws to go with the temper. The canines in the upper and lower jaws constantly grind and sharpen each other, and the lower jaw also got a pair of tusks about 40 cm long that jut forwards – this is an animal not to be trifled with. But the hippopotamus is still bound to the water’s edge, especially during the day, unlike the last pachyderm of Africa (and Asia) – the rhinoceros.

3) The rhinoceros. There are five species of rhinoceros – at least in the official papers. In real life, the smaller species might have died out due to the human encroachment upon their habitat and the poachers killing them for their horns that supposedly have healing/aphrodisiac properties or may be used in decoration, just as the elephants’ ivory is.

Of the species of rhinoceros that still survive in the wild, most of them also live in Africa – the white rhinoceros and the black. As it has become known in the recent years, the white rhinoceros is not so much white, as it is wide, which was what it was called by the first European colonists of Africa – the Dutch. The name got corrupted into white later on, by the British. (The two words sound similar even in English.)

Regardless of the name and the color of skin, the white rhinoceros does have a wide, square-shaped lip that makes it a good grazer. Whereas the elephant prefers to browse in trees and elsewhere, utilizing its famous trunk and the hippopotamus eats mostly shoreline vegetation, like the papyrus, the white rhinoceros feeds on grass, utilizing its wide mouth as a vacuum cleaner or a lawn mower, and keeping its head low to ground (it is already low slung to make this easier). This makes it hard for the rhinoceros to look around, but because it has infamously poor eyesight, it does not mind. Furthermore, the shape of its head keeps its ears sufficiently high for it to listen to any alarm calls or sounds, and when it hears something suspicious, it charges.

The white rhinoceros may be smaller, or shorter, than the African bush elephant, but their comparative anatomies allow the white rhinoceros to be a more efficient lifter than the elephant. A bush elephant is 36 percent efficient, when lifting with its tusks; a white rhinoceros – 59 percent efficient and it uses its horn. Of course, it usually does not just lift (though there is a video on YouTube showing a rhinoceros doing exactly that to an African buffalo, but the buffalo had started it), but also gores and/or tosses the unlucky soul at the end of it; all African rhinoceroses do. (More about the other rhinoceros species below.)

How many rhinoceroses there are in Africa, species-wise? First, the white rhinoceros, which is now split into two species or subspecies, the northern (Central and Eastern Africa) and the southern (South Africa). The southern white rhinoceros still exists in large numbers; the northern does not.

And then there is the black rhinoceros, which is smaller and more gracile than the white is. The white rhinoceros is a grazer, feeding primarily on grass; the black rhinoceros is more of a browser, feeding on higher growing vegetation – young and small trees, shrubs, which it grabs with its hooked lips (hence its’ other name, the hook-lipped rhinoceros, because it is no more black than the white rhinoceros is white). It inhabits not just open spaces as the white rhinoceros, but forests and woodlands as well; it is a less social animal than the white rhinoceros, and is less often encountered by the tourists – otherwise the two species of rhinoceros are very similar, especially in appearance, especially to a layperson.

Rudyard Kipling, in “The Jungle Book”, has never really talked about the Asian rhinoceroses or about rhinoceroses at all. That is not the case in his “Just-So-Stories”, which talk not only about the elephant (how it got its trunk), but also about the rhinoceros, how it got its’ wrinkly skin. The trick here is that the rhinoceros is not so much an African rhinoceros, black or white, which have two horns, and whose skin is relatively smooth, but about the Indian rhinoceros, also known as the Asian one-horned rhinoceros.

Whereas in Africa the white rhinoceros is a creature of open spaces, grazing on grass, and the black rhinoceros is more of jack-of-all-trades, found in forest, open spaces and scrubland, browsing on leaves with its hooked lip and high-positioned head, the Asian rhinoceroses live along the water’s edge and in overgrown plains – open spaces, sort of, but still much wetter and greener than the African savannahs are. This sort of habitat gives the Asian rhinoceroses more of a hippopotamus-sort of lifestyle, than that of its’ African relatives.

Incidentally, the interspecies relationships of rhinoceroses are no more straightforward than those of elephants or hippopotamuses. Whereas the Asian elephant is more closely related to the extinct woolly mammoth than to other modern elephants, and the hippopotamuses are more closely related to whales and dolphins, the rhinoceros species, all of them, each belong to their own group in the overall rhinoceros family. As a result, the similarities of the Asian rhinoceros, for example, to the African species is somewhat superficial: its hide is much more wrinkled than that of either black or white rhinoceros, it has only one horn, and it doesn’t even like to use it – when attacking, it would rather bite than gore, and though its teeth aren’t as big as those of the hippopotamus, they’re still large.

And as for family relationships, the rhinoceroses are part of the perissodactyl group, also known as the odd-toed ungulates, due to the odd number of toes on their feet – one (horses, zebras, donkeys) or three (rhinoceroses or tapirs). Large, wrinkly and grey, rhinoceroses look almost like dinosaurs – and they got the right to the look, for they were there first.

The first megafauna of the age of mammals belonged to the cousins of rhinoceroses. The first, the brontotheres of the late Eocene and Oligocene even looked similar, but were even dumber, their horns were made from bone, whereas the rhinoceros horn is compressed hair instead, technically speaking. And the Paraceratherium of the Oligocene and Miocene, while only a cousin to the modern rhinoceroses – it belonged to a group called the running rhinoceroses – was the biggest land mammal of all times.

The first half of the age of mammals, called the Palaeogene, was the heyday of the perissodactyl mammals, but then other challengers arrived. The artiodactyls, to which the hippopotamus is related, appeared, and proved to be more efficient at digesting plants. They, and the perissodactyls, are related, but only distantly – more so than the hippopotamus and the whales, for comparison.

The Miocene was also the heyday of the proboscideans – not so much the modern elephants, but their extinct cousins – the mastodons, the Stegodons, the gomphotheres, the deinotheres, etc. And though none of them were as big as the Paraceratherim was, and none of them were more efficient at digestion than the modern elephants are, they were still better at it than the rhinoceroses and its cousins were, and the fortunes of the odd-toed ungulates began to ebb. Nowadays, the most widespread odd-toed ungulates are the gracile ones – the horse and its relatives, wild and domestic. The robust perissodactyls – the rhinoceroses and the tapirs (similar to rhinoceroses, but instead horns they have proboscis-like nose, making them look strange) – are in distinct minority, and are being affected by the humans: rhinoceroses for their horns, tapirs – via habitat destruction, for they are creatures of rainforests and other out-of-the-way places, and the quantity of these places is shrinking fast.

The massive pachyderm mammals of the modern world may look superficially similar, but each group belongs to a different branch of the mammal family tree. They all live different lives and have different relatives. Regardless, they are all being endangered and in need of being saved and protected by humans. Please support the various wildlife organizations that protected wild-life abroad and at home – that is all.

End

Description
When the Europeans have arrived in Africa and Asia, they have met people and animals that they had not seen since the ancient times, including such formidable creatures as the so-called pachyderms – the elephant, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. Superficially similar to each other, each of them stands apart from the other two and every other beast of dry land; each of them has its own story to tell, and these are their stories.

1) The elephant. The biggest of all land beasts, the elephant cuts a familiar and formidable figure, from the grey and wrinkly skin, to the massive ears, to the dexterous trunk, composed of 100 000 muscles on average, to the infamous tusks, the source of ivory that had killed many of these formidable beasts.

Nowadays, what people often do not realize, there are three species of elephant. The most astounding and well known, is the African bush elephant. This is the elephant that was used by Hannibal in the Second Punic War against the Roman republic, and it is the one threatened the most by the ivory trade as it got the largest tusks.

It lives mostly in Eastern and Central Africa, mostly in the savannah and the bushland, hence the name ‘bush’. The females and the calves live in herds, but the bull elephants live on their own (the same is true for all of the modern elephants). They feed on any sort of vegetation that they can pick up with their dextrous trunks or bring down with their mammoth weight, and contrary to the popular opinion, they can be domesticated and trained, just as their foreign relatives can be – but it is not too economically viable in the modern times, so they do not.

The other species of the African elephant is the so-called forest elephant because it lives in jungles of Western and Central Africa. It is shorter than the bush elephant is – the bush elephant and its trunk can reach almost as high as a giraffe’s neck can – smaller and has differently shaped ears and different sort of ivory in their tusks. This enabled the scientists to figure out that this mammal is not a subspecies of the bush elephant, but is its’ own beast.

The different lifestyles that the two African creatures live reflect on their appearance. The forest elephant’s habitat is not as seasonal as the bush elephant’s – there is always something green to chew upon, and there is always plenty of moisture. Consequently, they do not migrate as far and as wide as the bush elephant does, and their diet includes much more fruit than the bush elephant’s. Sadly, it still comes into conflict with humans, not so much over ivory, as in case of the bush elephant, but because humans are destroying the African jungle – the forest elephant’s habitat.

The Asian elephant, as far as elephants go, is smaller than the African, especially in its tusks and ears. Its’ skull is shorter and its trunk is built differently too. Just like the African forest elephant, the Asian elephant (also sometimes called the Indian elephant in the past), lives primarily in the forest, but sometimes it comes upon the plantations of humans, which it raids. (The African elephants do something similar as well.) This does not endear the Asian elephant to the people, who sometimes capture the animal in question and raise them to become beasts of labour; Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” duology and adult stories occasionally dwell on this topic; Hathi of “The Jungle Book” is an Asian elephant, of course.

Speaking of Kipling, much of what “The Jungle Book” tells about the elephant-human interaction in Asia is correct; unlike the Europeans, the North Africans and the Middle Easterners, the Hindus often used war elephants in their wars; but just as the Carthaginians have discovered, war elephants are not super-weapons of any sort, and can be defeated rather handily by other armies – this is one of the reasons why the ordinary cavalry had survived for so long, and war elephants did not.

Another reason, of course, is that an elephant requires much more food than a donkey, a horse, or even a camel – not just because it is bigger, but also because its’ digestive system is less effective. Elephants may have hoof-like toes, but they are not ungulates (mammals with hooves), they are called proboscideans, when scientists want to combine them with their distant extinct cousins, such as the American mastodon, or paengulates, “near ungulates”, a name that the elephants sometimes share with their evolutionary cousins, and those cousins are as different from the elephants as mammals can be.

Cousin number one is the hyrax – a small, furry mammal that looks more like a guinea pig than, well, an elephant. There are several species of these mammals – some live among the rocks, others – in trees. They look like rodents, but got more of an attitude, as sometimes they try to counterattack a predator that is harassing them. They live in families, but are less efficient diggers than the true rodents are.

And the other cousin branch is the ‘sea cows’, the dugong and the manatees. Shaped half like whales and half like walruses, these creatures have retained hoof-like nails on their front flippers, and male dugongs actually have small tusks, just as the bull elephants do. They are the biggest mammals in the seas that eat plants (primarily sea grass), and unlike the whales, the dolphins, and the bigger seals (walrus, elephant seal, fur seals and sea lions), they do not go into open, deeper water, but stay in coastal shallows; the manatees actually live in rivers rather than in the seas.

Either way, the elephants, the hyraxes and the sea cows are all less efficient digesters than other herbivores are, and have rather robust, chunky bodies to house large stomachs and guts; between that and the moustaches its’ anyone’s guess who the sea cows could’ve inspired the seductive mermaid myth – but that is the sea cows’ problems; the elephants hadn’t inspired any seductive myths, but they are thoughtful and intelligent creatures, very popular among fans of zoos and circuses, which makes them different from their neighbours, such as the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros.

2) The hippopotamus. Whereas the African bush elephant is the biggest mammal on Africa’s land, the hippopotamus is the biggest beast in Africa’s rivers. It is much more low-slung than the elephants and the rhinoceroses are, but its jaws open far wider than those of the elephants’ or of the rhinoceroses. This is important to know, for the hippopotamus not only just a gape big enough to bite a human in two, it got the fiery hair trigger temper to motivate it, and that is one of the main reasons why no one ever tried taming or domesticating a hippopotamus.

The other main reason, of course, is that the hippopotamus’s skin might look thick, but it is still very vulnerable to the sweltering African sun: a hippopotamus may overheat, dehydrate, or oth-erwise perish if it stays on land for too long. It may also be attacked, not just be people, but also by prides of lions, who, by working together, can be large enough, and strong enough, to overwhelm not just hippopotamuses, but also young and juvenile African bush elephants.

In the African rivers, however, the hippopotamus rules the roost, as it is powerful enough as well as sufficiently armed, to bite in two not just a Nile crocodile, but also a bull shark, if it comes far enough upstream. Hippopotamuses eat, sleep, defecate, mate, nurse, even get groomed (by local fish) underwater, though they still fall short of the extent that their close cousins do – but then again, their close cousins are cetaceans, dolphins and whales.

For a while it was assumed that hippopotamuses belonged to the artiodactyl family, to mammals with an even number of toes/hooves – i.e. the deer, the antelope, the camel, etc. More precisely, it was assumed that because the hippopotamus did not ruminate as the deer and the antelope do, it was more closely related to the wild pigs: an idea that was further reinforced by the behavior of the other species of hippopotamus – the pygmy hippopotamus.

This little-known creature spends much more of its time on land than in the water, sometimes even sleeping in burrows – but then again, it lives in African rainforests, where the climate is much damper, less sunny, and there are not too many large predators unlike in the African savannahs and large freshwater bodies. The pygmy hippopotamus is also much shyer and less obvious or loud than the ordinary hippopotamus is, and its behavior is similar to the behavior of the wild pigs.

As a consequence, many people believed that hippopotamuses were related to swine, until DNA and other tests were made, where it was revealed that hippopotamuses are much more closely related to the dolphins and the whales, rather than to the artiodactyls. More precisely, the hippopotamuses and the cetaceans have ancestors that are more closely related to each other, than to other kinds of mammals – pigs, antelope, deer, horses, elephants, etc. This sort of evolutionary relationship makes hippopotamuses very aquatic animals, but unlike the whales or the dolphins they are not particularly intelligent, but they are particularly belligerent, so they best be left alone, whether in water or on land...something that may be hard to do. Much of Africa is seasonal, subject to periods of plenty and drought, and when the latter happens, when food and water becomes scarce in the wild, this is when people and hippopotamuses begin to run into each other with bad results for both sides. (The same goes for the African bush elephant as well.)

The hippopotamus, unlike the pygmy hippopotamus, is a belligerent and aggressive creature; it got the strength, the jaws, and the teeth in its jaws to go with the temper. The canines in the upper and lower jaws constantly grind and sharpen each other, and the lower jaw also got a pair of tusks about 40 cm long that jut forwards – this is an animal not to be trifled with. But the hippopotamus is still bound to the water’s edge, especially during the day, unlike the last pachyderm of Africa (and Asia) – the rhinoceros.

3) The rhinoceros. There are five species of rhinoceros – at least in the official papers. In real life, the smaller species might have died out due to the human encroachment upon their habitat and the poachers killing them for their horns that supposedly have healing/aphrodisiac properties or may be used in decoration, just as the elephants’ ivory is.

Of the species of rhinoceros that still survive in the wild, most of them also live in Africa – the white rhinoceros and the black. As it has become known in the recent years, the white rhinoceros is not so much white, as it is wide, which was what it was called by the first European colonists of Africa – the Dutch. The name got corrupted into white later on, by the British. (The two words sound similar even in English.)

Regardless of the name and the color of skin, the white rhinoceros does have a wide, square-shaped lip that makes it a good grazer. Whereas the elephant prefers to browse in trees and elsewhere, utilizing its famous trunk and the hippopotamus eats mostly shoreline vegetation, like the papyrus, the white rhinoceros feeds on grass, utilizing its wide mouth as a vacuum cleaner or a lawn mower, and keeping its head low to ground (it is already low slung to make this easier). This makes it hard for the rhinoceros to look around, but because it has infamously poor eyesight, it does not mind. Furthermore, the shape of its head keeps its ears sufficiently high for it to listen to any alarm calls or sounds, and when it hears something suspicious, it charges.

The white rhinoceros may be smaller, or shorter, than the African bush elephant, but their comparative anatomies allow the white rhinoceros to be a more efficient lifter than the elephant. A bush elephant is 36 percent efficient, when lifting with its tusks; a white rhinoceros – 59 percent efficient and it uses its horn. Of course, it usually does not just lift (though there is a video on YouTube showing a rhinoceros doing exactly that to an African buffalo, but the buffalo had started it), but also gores and/or tosses the unlucky soul at the end of it; all African rhinoceroses do. (More about the other rhinoceros species below.)

How many rhinoceroses there are in Africa, species-wise? First, the white rhinoceros, which is now split into two species or subspecies, the northern (Central and Eastern Africa) and the southern (South Africa). The southern white rhinoceros still exists in large numbers; the northern does not.

And then there is the black rhinoceros, which is smaller and more gracile than the white is. The white rhinoceros is a grazer, feeding primarily on grass; the black rhinoceros is more of a browser, feeding on higher growing vegetation – young and small trees, shrubs, which it grabs with its hooked lips (hence its’ other name, the hook-lipped rhinoceros, because it is no more black than the white rhinoceros is white). It inhabits not just open spaces as the white rhinoceros, but forests and woodlands as well; it is a less social animal than the white rhinoceros, and is less often encountered by the tourists – otherwise the two species of rhinoceros are very similar, especially in appearance, especially to a layperson.

Rudyard Kipling, in “The Jungle Book”, has never really talked about the Asian rhinoceroses or about rhinoceroses at all. That is not the case in his “Just-So-Stories”, which talk not only about the elephant (how it got its trunk), but also about the rhinoceros, how it got its’ wrinkly skin. The trick here is that the rhinoceros is not so much an African rhinoceros, black or white, which have two horns, and whose skin is relatively smooth, but about the Indian rhinoceros, also known as the Asian one-horned rhinoceros.

Whereas in Africa the white rhinoceros is a creature of open spaces, grazing on grass, and the black rhinoceros is more of jack-of-all-trades, found in forest, open spaces and scrubland, browsing on leaves with its hooked lip and high-positioned head, the Asian rhinoceroses live along the water’s edge and in overgrown plains – open spaces, sort of, but still much wetter and greener than the African savannahs are. This sort of habitat gives the Asian rhinoceroses more of a hippopotamus-sort of lifestyle, than that of its’ African relatives.

Incidentally, the interspecies relationships of rhinoceroses are no more straightforward than those of elephants or hippopotamuses. Whereas the Asian elephant is more closely related to the extinct woolly mammoth than to other modern elephants, and the hippopotamuses are more closely related to whales and dolphins, the rhinoceros species, all of them, each belong to their own group in the overall rhinoceros family. As a result, the similarities of the Asian rhinoceros, for example, to the African species is somewhat superficial: its hide is much more wrinkled than that of either black or white rhinoceros, it has only one horn, and it doesn’t even like to use it – when attacking, it would rather bite than gore, and though its teeth aren’t as big as those of the hippopotamus, they’re still large.

And as for family relationships, the rhinoceroses are part of the perissodactyl group, also known as the odd-toed ungulates, due to the odd number of toes on their feet – one (horses, zebras, donkeys) or three (rhinoceroses or tapirs). Large, wrinkly and grey, rhinoceroses look almost like dinosaurs – and they got the right to the look, for they were there first.

The first megafauna of the age of mammals belonged to the cousins of rhinoceroses. The first, the brontotheres of the late Eocene and Oligocene even looked similar, but were even dumber, their horns were made from bone, whereas the rhinoceros horn is compressed hair instead, technically speaking. And the Paraceratherium of the Oligocene and Miocene, while only a cousin to the modern rhinoceroses – it belonged to a group called the running rhinoceroses – was the biggest land mammal of all times.

The first half of the age of mammals, called the Palaeogene, was the heyday of the perissodactyl mammals, but then other challengers arrived. The artiodactyls, to which the hippopotamus is related, appeared, and proved to be more efficient at digesting plants. They, and the perissodactyls, are related, but only distantly – more so than the hippopotamus and the whales, for comparison.

The Miocene was also the heyday of the proboscideans – not so much the modern elephants, but their extinct cousins – the mastodons, the Stegodons, the gomphotheres, the deinotheres, etc. And though none of them were as big as the Paraceratherim was, and none of them were more efficient at digestion than the modern elephants are, they were still better at it than the rhinoceroses and its cousins were, and the fortunes of the odd-toed ungulates began to ebb. Nowadays, the most widespread odd-toed ungulates are the gracile ones – the horse and its relatives, wild and domestic. The robust perissodactyls – the rhinoceroses and the tapirs (similar to rhinoceroses, but instead horns they have proboscis-like nose, making them look strange) – are in distinct minority, and are being affected by the humans: rhinoceroses for their horns, tapirs – via habitat destruction, for they are creatures of rainforests and other out-of-the-way places, and the quantity of these places is shrinking fast.

The massive pachyderm mammals of the modern world may look superficially similar, but each group belongs to a different branch of the mammal family tree. They all live different lives and have different relatives. Regardless, they are all being endangered and in need of being saved and protected by humans. Please support the various wildlife organizations that protected wild-life abroad and at home – that is all.

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