The white rhinoceros or square-lipped rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is one of the five species of rhinoceros that still exist. It has a wide mouth used for grazing and is the most social of all rhino species. The white rhino consists of two subspecies: the southern white rhino, with an estimated 17,460 wild-living animals at the end of 2007 (IUCN 2008), and the much rarer northern white rhino. The northern subspecies has very few remaining, with six individuals left, all in captivity.
Read more about White Rhinoceros: Naming, Taxonomy and Evolution, Description, Behavior and Ecology, Distribution, In Zoos
Famous quotes containing the word white:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)