Sumatran Tidbit From Richard Freeman




Size Comparison For Living Rhinoceros Species.
The Sumatran One-horned Rhino (Javan Rhino, Light Blue) is marginally longer and taller
than the more widely-known Sumatran Two-horned Rhinoceros (in Green)
Illustration from Wikipedia.

 


Baron Georges Cuvier, best-known in Cryptozoological
circles as the originator of
"Cuvier's Rash Dictum", title of one of Heuvelmans' chapters
Also an illustration from Wikipedia

 Richard Freeman sent me this link as pertinent to the discussion about unknown animals on Sumatra (I still haven't checked the fable about the monkey yet, Richard!)

"The folowing book on Sumatra contains a small piece about hippos in Sumatra. The author thinks the witness had mistook dugongs.

http://beancoolen.wordpress.com/ "

After which I sent in the reply (Which quotes the passage in question):

"The author makes the astute observation that Sumatra must have been the Taprobane of the ancients. This is the oldest affirmation of that idea that I have seen: I came to that conclusion independantly many years ago before I found that others had said so before me.

"Some evidence for Trans-Pacific diffusion in here, but unfortunately the length of time the different cultigens have been known locally is not indicated. I would like to know how long the natives have known maize and red pepper.

"The paragraph mentioning Hippopotamuses is as follows:

"HIPPOPOTAMUS.

Hippopotamus, kuda ayer: the existence of this quadruped in the island of Sumatra having been questioned by M. Cuvier, and not having myself actually seen it, I think it necessary to state that the immediate authority upon which I included it in the list of animals found there was a drawing made by Mr. Whalfeldt, an officer employed on a survey of the coast, who had met with it at the mouth of one of the southern rivers, and transmitted the sketch along with his report to the government, of which I was then secretary. Of its general resemblance to that well-known animal there could be no doubt. M. Cuvier suspects that I may have mistaken for it the animal called by naturalists the dugong, and vulgarly the sea-cow, which will be hereafter mentioned; and it would indeed be a grievous error to mistake for a beast with four legs, a fish with two pectoral fins serving the purposes of feet; but, independently of the authority I have stated, the kuda ayer, or river-horse, is familiarly known to the natives, as is also the duyong (from which Malayan word the dugong of naturalists has been corrupted); and I have only to add that, in a register given by the Philosophical Society of Batavia in the first Volume of their Transactions for 1799, appears the article 'couda aijeer, rivier paard, hippopotamus' amongst the animals of Java."

From which it is plain to see that Cuvier simply chose to mistrust the accounts of explorers that specified the creature was a quadruped, as the author clearly also points out. The author feels that the natives know both the dugong and the Water-horse (Kuda ayer) well enough not to confuse the two. That the Water Horse in this case is clearly the one-horned rhinoceros is attested to by later zoologists. This is a very clear passage on the subject and I thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

Rhinos of Sumatra

For the past week or so Oll Lewis has been posting news announcements about Sumatran rhinoceroses and I have been going along posting against the comments at the end. It seems that we were having a failure to communicate. I finally asked Jon Downes the direct question asking should I just go on ahead and make a general posting on the matter.

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..



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.



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


Sumatran hairy two-horned rhinoceros, Cinicinatti zoo, from Wikipedia.