DD to JD on 9-19-2011:
Look, do I really and seriously need to write a blog entry on Sumatran one-horned rhinos? I had done so in some point in the past, but I seem to keep sending Oll Lewis the information and he seems to keep on ignoring what I say. The whole thing is entirely a problem depending on which reference books you look at. It's exactly the same as looking up the Oriental variety of Huso sturgeon around China-several of the standard fish atlases seem completely unaware that genus exists in that area while several other local sources are not even aware there is supposed to be any kind of a problem about its existance, and they include photos of such large sturgeons in their articles.
Which elicited the reply:
JD to DD on 9-22-2011:
I thought Javan rhinos were extinct everywhere except Java, one place in Vietnam and possibly northern Burma. If not, maybe you do need to write a blog..
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| Range Map for Javan Rhinos, from an article about the Vietnamese population. |
I had made some mentions of the matter in the yahoo group Frontiers-of-Zoology as far back as the group's beginnings in 2006. A member back on Halloween of that year queried my reference to rhinoceroses fighting with their tusks and not their horns and part of my response included the following information:
"Actually this matter of tusks was something I found out about in Sanderson's files, seems there were rumors of a 'Hippopotamus' in Sumatra for years until somebody connected up the teeth natives were selling with a reported rhinoceros with one horn. It evidently fights with its teeth, and the horn is small, not noticeable at all in some females"
The two rhinos are clearly distinctive from one another because of habitat and habits as well as the number of horns: the Sumatran one-horned rhinos are marsh and swamp dwellers and are largely lacking in body hair. The two-horned Sumatran rhinos are more highlands forest animals and they are hairy.
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| Sumatran One-horned "Water Rhino" photo ca 2006 |
Caption on last photo: "Sumatran Javan Rhino. This was an unknown animal to Willy Ley and so on into Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures : it was not to Sanderson in Living Mammals of the World"
Here is the full information as I gave it to Jon just before posting it here:
I genuinely don't know how this can continue to be a problem especially since the matter has been "On the books" at least since the 1950s.
The rhinos in general are predominantly one-horned in the Orient and two-horned in Africa. If a one-horned species exists in Africa, that would be unusual: conversely, the two-horned rhinos in the Orient are the ones that are rarer and exceptional. In the Orient, there are two species of one-horned rhinos; the indian species and then the second species that lives in Burma and points East, including Indonesia. The second species is the one called the Javan rhino.
If you have a copy of Ivan T. Sanderson's Living Mammals of the World, the pertinent information is on page 241:
"There is another smaller species of this genus, known rather misleadingly as the Javan Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sundaicus) Which is found in isolated patches throughout Burma, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Java. This animal does not have the bosses in its hide and its pleats are differently arranged, and the surface of the skin usually forms a sort of crocodile pattern resulting from small cracks. There was once [In the 1920s and 1930s, I think-DD] a prolonged discussion in scientific literature as to whether there was both a one-horned and a two-horned rhinoceros in Sumatra, the presence of a one-horned species being doubted. However, it is still fairly numerous in the reed-filled bottoms, swamps, and estuaries of that island. On the mainland it is becoming exceedingly rare [This is as of the 1950s and 1960s-DD]"
There is also the larger, mainland subspecies of the Sumatran rhinoceros, now probably extinct. The species is a hairy rhinoceros and the description always sounded like a relic of the Ice-Age wooly rhinoceros to me.
--Best Wishes, Dale D.
Incidentally the Javan population and the Sumatran population of the Javan Rhinoceros are thought to be the same species. The Javan (Sunda) rhinoceros was the last of rhinoceros species to be identified by science and some amazement developed recently that some pockets of the species had survived undetected in parts of Vietnam despite the damage the war had taken on them as well as the rest of the ecosystem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatran_Rhinoceros
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros
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| Sumatran hairy two-horned rhinoceros, Cinicinatti zoo, from Wikipedia. |
