Sudan, last male Northern White Rhino featured in Google Doodle

California: Google Doodle celebrated Sudan, the last northern white rhinoceros in the world on Sunday with a stunning illustration.

The stunning illustration looks back on the day of 2009 when Sudan and three other white rhinos had arrived at their new home at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a wildlife sanctuary in Kenya. Before these rhinos were moves, the species had been declared extinct in the wild.

The report from The Ecologist reveals that poachers have hunted the northern white rhinos to the brink of extinction in the 1970s and 1980s. These giant grazers' horns are harvested for the use of Chinese medicine.

They are also used in making ornamental dagger handles for the booming Yemeni market for sharp, stabby status symbols.

The ground-up rhino horn is exactly the same stuff as ground-up fingernails, and studies later revealed that it's not actually a useful medicine. However, Sudan was one of the luckiest white rhinos. Not only did he live to old age but also fathered two daughters.

However, life in the wild had not very easy for Sudan. A report from Forbes Magazine revealed that he had dodged the bullet of the poacher mostly because, in the year 1976, conservationists had whisked him from the wilds of Southern Sudan to a zoo in Czechoslovakia. At Sudan, the number of white rhino had fallen by the thousands. Sudan then returned to Africa from the zoo after 23 years on December 20, 2019.

He was accompanied by his daughter and granddaughter along with an unrelated male rhino- they were the last of their kind in the world.

Sudan had passed away in 2018.

After returning back to Ol Pejeta Conservancy wildlife sanctuary in Kenya, the elderly rhino had outlived his younger male companion, Suni, who died in 2014. By 2018, Sudan's bones and muscles had become too weak to hold him up along with wounds on his skin which refused to heal. Hence, the veterinarians had decided that the most humane option was to euthanize him.

Sudan's euthanisation has left Najin and Fatu, the white rhino's daughter and granddaughter respectively, as the last northern white rhinos ever to walk the Earth.

Old Sudan was put to sleep and he had passed away at the old age of 45.

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