RHINOCEROS SKELETON FREE

RHINOCEROS SKELETON FREE

We faced the decision of whether to cut the pelivis free and force the two rods out of each vertebra. The rhino being reassembled вЂ“ the new position has the hips higher than the shoulders, with the neck angled down.

In fact, not only was that rod fixed by a strong resin, but a thinner rod had been drilled and glued through the main body (centrum) of each vertebra and through the pelvis, making it immovable. We thought that they were simply held in place by a single iron rod running through the neural arch of the vertebrae (the space for the spinal chord). The bones of the spine and pelvis were actually more solidly attached than we realised. The shoulders are now lower than the hips, and the head lower still, but we found that we couldnвЂ™t introduce a natural curve along the spine. The вЂњoldвЂќ rhinoвЂ™s spine was ruler-straight and parallel with the floor, before a neck that pointed up. Rhinos spines curve downwards from the hips to the shoulders, and then down again along the neck. Now Reg is the woody brown colour of old bone. The first thing I said when the doors to the van opened and I saw Reg was вЂњitвЂ™s a completely different colour!вЂќ Before, Reg was off-white, as you might expect bone to be. At the same time we would reposition him so he was actually rhino-shaped. The primary goals of RegвЂ™s makeover were to clean the skeleton of the nasty grime that coated him, built up after 104 years on open display, much of which was spent in a room lit by oil lamps and to stabilise his mount to be less precarious.

It would be easy to say вЂњyou get what you pay forвЂќ, but that might be unfair as the ironmongery skills used were impressive, and that rarely overlaps with training in skeletal anatomy. The rhino skeleton came to the Museum as loose bones in 1911 from the вЂњUniversity South Kensington collectionвЂќ also referred to as the University of London Loan Collection, and was mounted on an iron frame, along with three other big skeletons, for the bargain price of ВЈ14. However, the pygmy hippopotamus is thought to have evolved from a similarly-sized ancestor.The Bone Idols project seeks to significantly prolong the вЂњshelf-livesвЂќ of our specimens so we can continue to use them, as we do today, in teaching, research and public engagement. Zoologist Г‰douard Louis Trouessart (1842 вЂ“ 1927) and Bernard Heuvelmans suggested that the size of the pygmy hippopotamus could be explained by Liberia and nearby regions of West Africa having once been an island, making it an example of insular dwarfism Heuvelmans argued that a rhinoceros living in what is now Liberia at the same time could have been subjected to the same process, giving rise to a pygmy species of rhinoceros. Schomburgk initially suspected that the pygmy rhinoceros could be the giant forest hog ( Hylochoerus meinertzhageni), a famously elusive animal found in Liberia, but the Kru clearly distinguished the pygmy rhinoceros from this animal. Schomburgk searched for this animal, but failed to find it. When the German explorer Hans Schomburgk (1880 вЂ“ 1967) sought the pygmy hippopotamus in Liberia in 1913, local Kru people told him about another pygmy animal, a rhinoceros, which lived in the mountains.

It is sometimes synonymised with forest rhinoceroses. The pygmy rhinoceros was a cryptid ungulate reported from the mountains of western Liberia by Hans Schomburgk. Illustration of the pygmy rhinoceros by Philippe Coudray in Guide des Animaux CachГ©s (2009).

Rhinoceros skeleton