Life may find a way, but it’s a questionable quality of life then you’re the last of your kind. There’s been experiments raising rare birds in isolation, and their songs don’t become as complex.” It’s the kind of heartbreaking conundrum that’s skipped over by Jurassic Park and its (many) sequels. “Birds are born with song but they become more complex as they interact with other birds. “If you were the only one of your kind, how do you learn how to be what you are?” White rhinos are particularly social, so what would lab-grown calf raised by a separate subspecies be? “Its cultural as well as biological,” she adds. “Would it be a northern white rhino?” she asks. It’s a well-intentioned project laced with philosophical and ethical concerns, as outlined by Ginsberg. The hope is that IVF techniques could be used with a southern white rhino – an entirely separate subspecies – as a surrogate. Ginsberg first saw the footage over a Zoom call with Dr Oliver Ryder, the director of San Diego's Frozen Zoo project, which preserves genetic material for use in conservation efforts.Ĭould this subspecies be bought back from beyond the brink? Prof Thomas Bernd Hildebrandt, project leader for German conservation organisation BioRescue, has overseen the creation of 12 northern white rhino embryos. The pulsating scene is a video of heart cells grown from samples taken from Angalifu, a male northern white rhino who died in 2014. Upon entering, the first thing visitors encounter is a video of a microscope slide blown up to the size of a car door and projected onto a shroud-like sheet of gauzy fabric stretched taut. The exhibition is kept dark to best display the projections, and it lends it a certain gloomy, gothic air to this reanimated menagerie. As of 2022, there are under 27,000 of them left in the wild, according to the WWF. We’re compelled by these gentle giants – but now we’ve almost wiped them out. Mosaics of rhinos can be found on the floors of ruined Roman villas in Sicily and Israel (in what was ancient Palestine). A couple of millennia later, humans painted their majestic horned outlines onto stone plaques in the mountains of southern Namibia. Prehistoric people daubed herds of them onto the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France some 32,000 years ago. Humans have been obsessed with rhinos for a very, very long time. “When we think of this powerful animal these are actually cultural ideas, not necessarily the real thing,” says Ginsberg. Together they pose existential questions about extinction in the Anthropocene. They are copies, copies of copies, powered by AI, taxidermy, or grown in a laboratory. The Substitute is one of four rhinoceros displays in the exhibition, except, as Ginsberg already explained, none of them are a real rhino. Since a bull rhino named Sudan died in captivity in 2018 there are only two of the subspecies left, both female. Instead, we’re across the hallway at The Lost Rhino, a new art installation curated by Ginsberg for the museum starring The Substitute (2019), a very vocal virtual replica of the functionally extinct northern white rhinoceros. We’re not speaking in front of the animatronic T-Rex, usually the loudest of the extinct animals bellowing through the Victorian halls. It’s a strong statement to make about a rhino-themed show, but it’s hard to hear her over the din in the Natural History Museum. “There are no rhinos in this exhibition,” says Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.
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