What could humans do that would be worse than killing the life all around us, irreversibly, at scale? One million species. Mass extinction is the ultimate crisis, doom of all dooms, the disaster toward which all other disasters flow. One million plant and animal species, it warned, were at risk of annihilation. In May 2019, just over a year after the death of Sudan, the United Nations issued an apocalyptic report about mass extinction. And then, inevitably, the world’s attention moved on. A photo of him being caressed by one of his caretakers went viral, collecting millions of likes on social media. We can never reconstruct all the odd little moments, boring and thrilling, that make a creature a creature, that make life life. But they wouldn’t be able to, not really. Living creatures would look at the dead one and try to imagine it alive. They were preparing a gift for the distant future: Someday, Sudan would be reassembled in a museum, like a dodo or a great auk or a Tyrannosaurus rex, and children would learn that once there had been a thing called a northern white rhinoceros. The caretakers boiled his bones in a vat. Right there in his pen, a team removed Sudan’s skin in big sheets. Scientists extracted what little sperm Sudan had left, packed it in a cooler and rushed it off to a lab. Finally, the veterinarians euthanized him. The men scratched Sudan’s rough skin, said goodbye, made promises, apologized for the sins of humanity. We expect extinction to unfold offstage, in the mists of prehistory, not right in front of our faces, on a specific calendar day. They had survived close encounters with lions and elephants and buffalo and baboons. His caretakers were veterans of the deep bush - not, on any level, strangers to death. In his final moments, Sudan was surrounded by the men who loved him. Two females, all by themselves, would not be able to save it. They would live out their days in a strange existential twilight - a state of limbo that scientists call, with heartbreaking dryness, “functional extinction.” Their subspecies was no longer viable. As Sudan declined, these two stood grazing in a nearby field. He still had two living descendants, both female: Najin, a daughter, and Fatu, a granddaughter. Veterinarians packed his wounds with medical clay.Īlthough Sudan was the last male, he was not, actually, the last of his kind. The men fed him bananas stuffed with pain pills, 24 pills at a time. He struggled, at first, to stand back up - his caretakers crouched and heaved, trying to help - but his legs were too weak. The previous day, shortly before sunset, he collapsed for the final time. His legs were covered with sores one deep gash had become badly infected. When he walked, his toes scraped the ground. For months now, his body had been failing. He was gray, the color of stone he looked like a boulder that breathed. Sudan was 45 years old, ancient for a rhino. Every desperate measure - legal, political, scientific - had already been exhausted. It was the grim climax of a conservation crisis that had been accelerating, for many decades, toward precisely this moment. Although his death was a disaster, it was not a surprise. Sudan was the last male northern white rhinoceros on earth - the end of an evolutionary rope that stretched back millions of years. He was a giant stillness at the center of all the motion. Until recently, Sudan had been a part of this pulse. All around him, for miles in every direction, the savannah teemed with life: warthogs, zebras, elephants, giraffes, leopards, lions, baboons - creatures doing what they had been doing for eons, hunting and feeding and scavenging, breathing and going and being. His big front horn was blunt, scarred, worn. ![]() Sudan lay still in the dirt, thick legs folded under him, huge head tilted like a capsizing ship. Little black-faced monkeys came skittering in over the fence to try to steal the morning carrots. On the horizon, the sun was struggling to make itself seen over the sharp double peaks of Mount Kenya. The day Sudan died, everything felt both monumental and ordinary. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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