Last Male of his kind: The rhino that became a conservation icon
Sudan, the world's last male northern white rhino, died in 2018. In his final years, he became a global celebrity and conservation icon, helping raise awareness about the brutality of poaching.
Sudan spent most of his life at the Safari Park Dvůr Králové in the Czech Republic from 1975 to 2009. He was then moved to the highly surveilled Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya, which was a last-ditch effort to encourage procreation with the remaining females of his subspecies. It didn't work.
Sudan died on 19 March 2018, age 45, crushing hopes of saving the northern white rhinos from extinction. Only two female northern white rhinos – both former zoo animals called Najin and Fatu – remain alive at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Both are incapable of sustaining a pregnancy and the subspecies is now "functionally extinct". But there is now new hope that it might be possible to resurect the northern white rhino after scientists have achieved the world's first IVF pregnancy in a closely-related subspecies, the southern white rhino. They hope to repeat this with northern white rhinos next.
Read full BBC News article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240124-the-photo-of-sudan-the-last-male-northern-white-rhino