If you could get one to hold still long enough for you to cut its horn off, would it grow back? I’m assuming they’re pointy because the grow faster in the center but that could just be me being stupid.
Are rhino horns good for anything apart from getting rhinos shot? They look daunting enough, are they actually used for poking other critters or do they serve some other less obvious purpose. Better reception, for instance.
they root out, dig a little, and fight with those horns. a healthy prime rhino has a short, blunt horn. a timid one content to graze tends to grow a long and thin horn.
I think rhino horns grow upward from the base. They’re made of keratin *so that some call them “compacted hair”, and aren’t made of the same material as antlers. A mutilated horn will not “fill back in”. There’s such a horn in the Hall of Indian Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.
Rhinos use their horns to hit things with, and they do try to pierce them . AFAIK that’s all they’re good for. Probably lady rhinos find them sexy – horns and suchlike seem to be sexual features.
For a long time there was a story that the horn of a unicorm was proof against poison, so kings tried to arrange to have cups made of whast they thought was unicorn horn – or at least ones that had a piece of unicorn horn built into it. As late as the 18th century, according to unicorn author Odell Shepherd, London Apothecaries were required to stock powdered unicorn horn. a pretty neat trick, as unicorns didn’t exist.
as a result, anything wiith a unicorn-like horn got pressed into service. The Cloisters in New York has a cop made of narwhal horn. And there are several cups of rhino horn.
There may be a grain of truth in the story, since, as one theory claims, a lot of ancient poisons were powerful alkaloids, and if it were to be put in a rhino-horn cup, it would start to dissolvve the binding keratin, and the user might be lucky enough to notice something happening to his cup before he drank the poison. a fascinating theory, which i have not been able to locate the original source of.
Sometimes their horns are cut off, leaving a flat sort of stub, before they’re transported between zoos, etc.
They grow back, but fairly slowly. Here’s one not long after arrival at Edinburgh Zoo. I think this rhino took about 2 years to grow this much horn back - when it arrived it’s horn had been cut back like the other one.
Of the lot, only the Southern White Rhino is not considered endangered to some degree. It’s a sad state of affairs for a family of mammals that was highly successful throughout the Miocene, Pliocene, and even the Ice Age, throughout the Old World, with giant forms, hippo-like amphibious forms, gazelle-like running forms, etc.
I don’t think they can, but if they could it would be like you seeing your own nose.
From this website:
“Rhinoceros have very poor eyesight. In fact, they cannot see a person standing motionless if they are more than 30m away. Since its eyes are on opposite sides of its head, the Rhinoceros must look with one eye at a time to see straight ahead.”
And here’s another photo showing that their eyes tend to look sideways more than ahead.
A friend of mine once asked, "Why should I care if there aren’t any more rhinos or elephants…what is the big deal? I replied, “Oh, I dunno–but tell me, when your grandchildren point at a picture in a book and ask why they’re all gone, what are ***you ***going to tell them?”
Appropriate musical selection for this thread: Adrian Belew , Lone Rhinoceros
[QUOTE=A. Belew]
I’m a lone rhinoceros–there ain’t one hell of a lots of us left in this world
They say I am ugly ,call me a beast when I’m half asleep
Is beauty such a big commodity? I always heard it was only so deep…
[/QUOTE]
