Sudan, the last northern white rhino

Sudan was unable to stand up in the end. He was treated for age-related complications that led to degenerative changes in muscles and bones combined with extensive skin wounds. Veterinary experts took the decision to euthanize the animal." At the age of 45, Sudan was a very old man, well over 100 years old in human equivalent years," said the charity Helping Rhinos.

Rhino horns are used in traditional Chinese medicine and for dagger handles in Yemen. A poaching crisis in the 1970s and 1980s wiped out northern white rhino populations in Uganda, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Chad. The last wild population was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but that succumbed to fighting in the region. At Ol Pejeta, Sudan was constantly under armed guard.

Given the danger that Sudan he would have been in when so much younger, he was among a group of northern white rhinos who were taken to a safari park in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s.

Sudan and a group of other northern white rhinos were moved back to Africa in 2009 in the hope that the move, in particular grassland at the Ol Peteja Conservancy in eastern Kenya, would give them more favorable breeding conditions.

The death of the only other northern white male, Suni, of natural causes in October 2014, further emphasized the need to urgently come up with alternative solutions for breeding.

Sudan eventually lived at Ol Peteja with the only other two members of his subspecies — his daughter Najin, and his granddaughter Fatu. Because of myriad health complications that mean the two cannot bear offspring, any future northern white rhino would have to be carried in pregnancy by southern white rhino female surrogates. However, their eggs would be used.