Baby’s got big feet. NC Zoo names 2-month-old rhinoceros
Blessed with a large set of tootsies, the newest rhino born at the N.C. Zoo has been christened with an anatomically appropriate name: Mguu, the Swahili term for “feet.”
Pronounced “mm-goo,” the name comes courtesy of Zach Neal, a zoo employee who won both a drawing and a private rhino tour.
While elephants’ feet do not flare out from their tree-trunk-like legs, a rhino floot splays out from its skinnier leg to support its bulk.
Mguu’s January birth brought the Asheboro zoo’s rhinoceros herd to nine, and the 2-month old calf marks the third Southern white rhino born there in less than two years, said spokeswoman Debbie Foster Fuchs. The animals roam the zoo’s 40-acre Watani grasslands in warmer weather.
White rhinos are the world’s second-largest land animal, and they are found in central and southern Africa, according to the World Wildlife Federation.
Only two northern white rhinos remained alive as of 2018, both of them female, under armed guard on a reservation in Kenya, the WWF said.
Southern white rhinos were hunted nearly to extinction in the early 20th century, prized for the supposed medical benefits from their horns, Foster Fuchs said.
Though still threatened by poaching and habitat loss, she said, about 20,000 still live in the wild. They are classified as “near-threatened,” the WWF reported.
The zoo is in Asheboro is about an hour and a half from Raleigh.
This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 11:38 AM.