Whose rhino also has "lip augmentation"? Let's meet this "rhino" with thick lips!

Rhinoceros have been found on the vast land of my country. In poems and ancient books, there is not only the luxury of the Shang King issuing a large-scale hunting mission to subdue 71 rhinos, but also the majestic posture of the Wu soldiers in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period "wielding Wu spears and wearing rhinoceros armor", and the interesting story of the Nanzhao Shanchan (now Kunming) building the Jingzhu Temple during the Zhenguan period of the Tang Dynasty when they met a strange monk while chasing rhinos... Until the 20th century, they were completely extinct in my country.

Let's go back to the more distant past, to the Miocene Epoch 24 million to 5.2 million years ago, there once lived on the land of my country a type of rhinoceros that looked very different from the rhinoceros we know - the large-lipped rhinoceros.

When you first see the restoration of the large-lipped rhino, you may be surprised to think that this thing is not a hippopotamus! Yes, by today's standards, they don't seem to be rhinos: short, fat and sturdy, short and thick limbs, the chassis is so low that it almost touches the ground, and it has a huge mouth. More importantly, it does not have the iconic horns. However, the large-lipped rhino does belong to the family Rhinoceros, and it is a subfamily of the now completely extinct hornless rhinoceros. Both males and females do not have horns. Rhino horns generally serve as weapons or display to the opposite sex. Without horns, how can males show off their majesty? The answer is the lower incisors. In their skull specimens, you can see that the lower jaw has two abnormally protruding, ivory-like incisors, and the males are much larger than the females.

In the restoration, these two incisors do not appear that big because of the illusion caused by the thick upper lip, another notable feature of the large-lipped rhinoceros, which is also the origin of their name. The developed and powerful upper lip is their weapon for eating. Since the lower incisors extend outward and are as sharp as the fangs of carnivores, they can use the upper lip to roll up the grass leaves and then use the lower incisors to cut them. The upper incisors have nothing to do with this process, so it is reasonable that they do not grow upper incisors. The molars have extremely high crowns and more wrinkles, which are suitable for grinding dry and hard grass, indicating that they can live in arid environments with scarce water. In fact, they have no choice.

In the Linxia Basin in Gansu Province where they lived, in the detection of stratigraphic composition samples, wind-born quartz sand particles were found from the late Miocene to the Holocene 15 million years ago, and the pockmarks and saucer-shaped pits on the particles were very clearly developed, indicating that the climate at that time was mainly hot and dry, and sandstorms were prevalent. Therefore, the only food they could eat was sparse xerophytic or semi-xerophytic herbs. In the Quaternary Period, with the rise of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the atmospheric circulation also changed, and winter winds appeared in the basin, which gradually became cold and dry. The large-lipped rhinoceros, which lost the environment on which they depended for survival, eventually became extinct. Their extinction also announced the complete disappearance of hornless rhinoceros from the earth.

Large-lipped rhinoceros skull fossil

Although we can still see living rhinos today, their situation is not optimistic. The number of some populations is less than 100, and the last bachelor of the wild northern white rhino also passed away under our witness. Rhinoceros have become a veritable "rare guest" in zoos. Perhaps the only thing we can do for them is to stop killing and harming them and give them more protection and care.