The last surviving male Northern White Rhinoceros, a 45-year-old called Sudan, has died. The Rhinoceros, who had been suffering from a degenerative illness, was put down by a vet on Monday 19 March 2018, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, to prevent any further suffering. He is survived by only two females of the species, his daughter and granddaughter, making prospects for the survival of the species now very poor, though sperm was collected from Sudan before he died, with a view to the artificial insemination of the females.
Northern White Rhinos formerly ranged across much of East and Central Africa, but were wiped out by poaching by 2008, when the last four surviving wild members of the species were officially declared to be dead when the could not be located despite extensive searches in the Garamba National Park and surrounding areas in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where they were last seen alive in 2006. The animals at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy are captive bred Rhinos that were transferred from the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic, in the hope of re-introducing the species to the wild, though this now seems unlikely.
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