Rumba and Rumbull

Rhinos are big, strong, dangerous and unpredictable.

The second biggest land mammal, after elephants.

Seriously Big

Rhinos are big, strong, dangerous, and unpredictable. They are the second biggest land mammal, after elephants. They can grow up to 4 tonnes in weight, though usually breeding rhinos are about 2 tonnes.

Food

White Rhinos, like the ones newly arrived at Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, graze grass. In winter or when grass is in short supply, they eat hay. Their digestion is designed similar to horses, so they also eat pony cubes and flaked maize (which is like corn flakes!)

Heat

Although Rhinos have very thick skin (25mm all over and 45mm thick at the shoulder!) they have no hair, so can only endure a certain amount of cold. The ones at Noah’s Ark have come from South Africa, where it is a bit like our summer all the year round. So they need electric heaters on cold days to keep them warm. On very frosty days they stay indoors all day.

Unique Features of Rhinos

Rhinos have a beautiful, unique body and head shape. They have a number of other features not found in any other mammal such as a composite foot, with three toes on each foot (with a foot-print like the ace of clubs). They usually have two nose horns of keratin, or hair material, which unlike all other horned mammals, lacks any bony centre. They have strong muscular lips to help them eat grass. This is unique among grazing animals. All other grazers eat with either their tongue (like ruminants that “chew the cud”) or with their teeth (like rodents and horses). African (White and Black) Rhinos have no front teeth (incisors) on the top or bottom. Other grazers have either bottom incisors only, as in all ruminants, or they have both top and bottom incisors, as in horses and rodents. Rhino pregnancy is 16 months. Maturity is about 6 years. Rhinos appear to be in a kind of their own, unrelated to any other animals but Rhinos.

Wallowing

Rhinos’ thick skin is also quite delicate. In summer they have a mud wallow, in which they can cover their skin with lovely thick mud. When the weather is too cold for wallowing they need mud packs and oil rubbing into their skin by the keepers from the edge of their pen. The keepers never go into their pens as they are too unpredictable. But Rhinos can be quite friendly and seem to like human contact. They can even be trained to lie down or to come to the edge of the pen for a scratch.

Origins

Rhinos appear, like other mammal families, suddenly in the fossil record. Rhino fossils appear in the Eocene era, in the same geological period as camels, dogs, cats, shrews, moles, horses and many other mammals we would recognise today. A few changes have taken place in each, but they are largely as they were then. The Rhinos at Noah’s Ark are the only ones in the Somerset, Gloucestershire or Wales area.