Broadly speaking, the evolution of rhinos began, as with all life forms, soon after our planet was born. But it took an awfully long time before anything like the horned giants of today began to roam the plains and forests of the world. In fact Earth was already some 99 percent along its 4.5 billion year path to the present before the first creatures we can definitely place as the ancestors of rhinos loped onto the evolutionary stage. This is a brief history of the rhino’s emergence some 55 million years ago, and its subsequent journey through countless climatic changes and extinction bottlenecks to face the challenges of the present.










