The Last of Their Kind

Summary

Under the blazing African sun, I trained my binoculars on Najin and Fatu in Ol Pejeta, a wildlife reserve on the plains of northern Kenya. From a distance, the two rhinoceroses could be mistaken for boulders, propping up the sky. Alongside other travelers in 2021, I watched the pair graze peacefully in the field, their heads bowed down to the dry grass, munching in unison. Although we were far from the animals in a safari truck, everyone spoke in hushed tones. A mother and daughter pair, Najin and Fatu are the last two northern white rhinos. The rest of their kin have been poached to extinction. When Fatu and Najin die, a thread of presence that connects generations of northern white rhinos to the African landscape, going back more than 10 million years, will be inexorably severed.Najin and Fatu had two horns each—one large at the very front of the snout, and a smaller one behind it. But Fatu’s had been lightly trimmed, blunted, to prevent her from jabbing Najin, who is too elderly now to keep up with Fatu’s play. With two armed guards always by their side, the rhinos looked both inviolate and fragile.But there is more to the lives of these two rhinos than meets the tourists’ eyes. Behind the scenes, veterinarians, cell biologists, and entrepreneurs are rushing to avert their imminent extinction through gene editing and in vitro fertilization. They believe it is still possible to restore the population of northern white rhinos to the African landscape by using surrogates of a closely related species (the southern white rhinoceroses) impregnated with lab-generated embryos from Fatu. ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . “A DNA sample is not equivalent to a species.”A partner in the rhino project is Colossal Biosciences, with a valuation of $10 billion, which made headlines this spring with its claim to have “resurrected” dire wolves, a species of wolf that went extinct some 10,000 years ago (and was the model for the wolves ...