I Searched 16 Years for the Swamp Rhinoceros

Sixteen years ago, in a roadside museum that will go unnamed here, an employee or perhaps the owner — it seemed to be a one-woman operation — informed me the Louisiana Swamp Rhinoceros had gone extinct as recently as ten thousand years ago.

I had never heard of such a thing. The Swamp Rhinoceros!

“Oh, yes. It was a very special dwarf rhinoceros, evolved to walk under cypress trees loaded with Spanish moss. There were herds of them, just as there were herds of Dwarf Mammoth.”

Well! You may imagine what I imagined.

Herds of mammoths, herds of rhinos, herds of white-tailed deer mixing with exotic deer — all of them browsing knee-deep in a cypress swamp. The long tresses of Spanish moss would tickle the heads and necks of the taller and less cautious. Perhaps a raucous Ivory-Billed Woodpecker would scream out a mocking cry as it zoomed through the trees.

Of course, I understood that tour guides confabulate. Roadside museum owners do too. But I thought they fibbed about human history. Who would think to invent an entire species?

It was ingenious. I never doubted her. For years, I’d wonder about the Louisiana Swamp Rhinoceros.

What was its story? Whatever wiped out the mammoths must have got it too.

And consider this. There were no Cattle Egrets in the Americas then. Who were its loyal companions to follow in its wake? Who rode on its back to clean its hide? Some unknown bird species, lost forever now in the mists of time?

Perhaps, even… multiple lost species?

From time to time ever after, I occasionally poked around in search of more information. Never did I find a clue. A few months ago on Twitter, an artist who specializes in doing reconstructions of fossil animals posted a helpful chart of North American mammal species of the late Pleistocene.

Well, 10,000 years ago is pretty late in the Pleistocene, but there was no Swamp Rhinoceros on the chart. There were no Rhinoceros species at all. Flabbergasted, I tweeted at the artist to ask.

The reply was disappointing, to say the least: "I'm not aware of any rhinoceros species in NA [North America] during the Pleistocene."

I’d been had, I thought. There were no dwarf Swamp Rhinoceros evolved to stroll under the Spanish moss in the silvery moonlight of an ancient Louisiana.

I walked away grumbling and wrote an early version of this story.

I kept thinking it might almost be worth it if I thought she'd been cackling in pleasure all these years over her spontaneous invention. But she probably never gave the gag another thought once I left the building. The fable was tailored to me because of some forgotten question I asked about dusty old mammoth bone fragments under dirty glass.

I originally ended the story this way, " I still don’t know whether I should admire her creativity. Or remain, as I am, slightly horrified."

Except there's a postscript. Someone read that early story and contacted me with a journal link to an article about the paleo-ecology of the dwarf rhinoceros of the Texas Gulf Coastal Plain.

The lady did not invent an entire dwarf rhinoceros out of whole cloth. You know what the catch was? The romantic dwarf rhino wandered through the swamps in the Miocene, not the Pleistocene. I'm now too tired to figure out what the Spanish moss was doing, but maybe it was there and maybe it wasn't.

In any case, the lady and I were only about 6 million years off. No wonder I couldn't find it.

If you were amused by this ridiculous adventure, I'd be thrilled if you tapped the <3 button and/or left a small tip.

Photo Credits

Feature Image: Reconstruction of Mammuthus falconeri (dwarf mammoth) (Late Pleistocene; Mediterranean Sea) by James St. John is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Central Image: “Oxpeckers are extremely useful” by Chris Eason is licensed under CC-by-2.0. (Minor photo editing by this Author)