Kees Rookmaaker

• Dr
• Editor at Rhino Resource Center

This is the 77th issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 29,004. This is an increase of at least 85 items in the last quarter. (see note on p.2 of this newsletter) Over 28,000 references are available as PDF on the RRC w...

The first post-Roman rhinoceros to be seen alive in Europe reached the harbour of Lisbon, Portugal on 20 May 1515. After a fight with an elephant staged on 3 June 1515, King Dom Manuel I ‘the Fortunate’ decided to gift the rhino to Pope Leo X in Rome. The animal drowned when the vessel was shipwrecked in a storm off La Spezia in northern Italy at t...

There was a considerable gap of 21 years between the illustrated description of a specimen of the Sumatran Rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) by William Bell in 1793 and the proposal to accept it as a named new species by Gotthelf Fischer in 1814. In the meantime some 17 authors reported the possibility that the animal should be regarded as a ne...

This is the 74th issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 28,670. This is an increase of 320 items in the last quarter. Over 28,000 references are available as PDF on the RRC website. THE RRC IMAGE GALLERY Regular users w...

Download or view open access at https://brill.com/display/title/64767 Rookmaaker, Kees. 2024. The Rhinoceros of South Asia. Leiden, Boston: Brill (Emergence of Natural History, vol. 6), pp. i-liv, 1-835 (4to). With contributions by Joachim K. Bautze and Kelly Enright. Total 67 chapters, 889 pages, 707 figures, 38 maps, 75 tables, 82 datasets, bibli...

In their response to Wilson, Pashkevich, Rookmaaker, et al. (2022), Ferreira et al. argue that our conclusions regarding shrinking rhino horns were risky, given the low sample size used for this assessment, the variation in rhino horn length related to non‐heritable factors (including age, sex, environment and behaviour) and the low impact that cur...

Alexander James Edward Cave (1900–2001) was a superb anatomist who extensively improved our knowledge of rhinoceros anatomy and osteology; he also published several studies on the osteology of other groups of mammals and one conservation-focused study about numbers of Ceratotherium cottoni in Uganda. Our contribution contains an identification of t...

Rhinos have a long history in European art and literature, having captivated the public for over 500 years. In China and India, this is even longer (Bishop 1933, Bose 2020). This long-term record means that there is a wealth of rhino imagery and publications available for researchers. The Rhino Resource Center (RRC) is a repository of such informat...

Online image repositories can offer a freely accessible, information‐rich and cost‐effective alternative to museum collections for studying long‐term changes in human interactions with nature and ecological and evolutionary change. The Rhino Resource Center (RRC) is one example, curated by experts and holding a collection of >4000 rhino images, inc...

This is the 66th issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 25,842. This is an increase of 187 items in the last quarter. Over 25,000 references are available as PDF on the RRC website. A SLIMMED DOWN NEWSLETTER Due to hosp...

The Fishing Cat is not a species known to inhabit Singapore. However, a historical specimen stated to have come from Singapore in 1819 and attributed to Pierre-Médard Diard (RMNH.MAM.59688) is now housed at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, the Netherlands. Two hundred years after it was obtained, the mounted skin and skull of this specimen, i...

Dear colleagues and friends, This is the 64th issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 25,555. This is an increase of 445 items in the last quarter. Over 25,000 references are available as PDF on the RRC website. With apo...

Only five species of the once-diverse Rhinocerotidae remain, making the reconstruction of their evolutionary history a challenge to biologists since Darwin. We sequenced genomes from five rhinoceros species (three extinct and two living), which we compared to existing data from the remaining three living species and a range of outgroups. We identif...

This is the 63rd issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 25,270. This is an increase of 160 items in the last quarter.

Dear colleagues and friends, This is the 62nd issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 25,110. This is an increase of 158 items in the last quarter.

This contribution contains additions and corrections associated with the Bibliography of Colin Peter Groves published in the present journal in 2018 (Rookmaaker & Robovský 2018).

This is the 61st issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 24,952. This is an increase of 224 items in the last quarter.

Some stories tend to lead their own life in the media and are repeated without any idea how they came about. One instance is the tale, usually set in Assam, that rhinos could be tame enough to be used by farmers to pull ploughs in the fields (Stracey 1963:98, Dutta 1991:151, Geer 2008:383, Mazumdar and Mahanta 2016:19). Perhaps, but when did this p...

Data on the size of Rhinoceros unicornis individuals in the wild are only reported in rare cases, usually after the animal was killed or more recently during translocation exercises. In a survey of literature, records regarding body length, height at shoulder, girth and horn length have been collated and calculated in metric dimensions. The maximum...

Dear colleagues and friends, This is the 58th issue of the quarterly e-newsletter of the Rhino Resource Center. Edited by Dr Kees Rookmaaker. The total number of references in the collection of the RRC now stands at 24,460. This is an increase of 230 items in the last quarter.

There have been only two specimens of the Javan rhinoceros (Rhinoceros son-daicus) alive in Europe. The first, imported from Java, was exhibited in the Lon-don Zoo from 7 March 1874 to 23 January 1885 (EDWARDS 2012). The second specimen was offered for sale by the animal dealer eARL HAG EN BEC K in Ham-burg in 1881. In many ways this extreme rarity...

New literature on the Rhinocerotidae

The proper explanation of the name white rhinoceros.