Besides the widely publicized exhibition of Clara, the female Greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), in Paris in 1749 by her owner, Douwe Mout, she was again reported in the French capital in 1752 and 1753. The visit in 1752 is embedded in a letter by the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel Sr., who wrote on 20 August 1752 that he had compared Clara’s teeth with a fossilized mammal tooth, which had been excavated at the start of 1751 in the German Harz Mountains and was studied by Samuel Christian Hollman in Göttingen. The adventurer Giacomo Casanova recalled that he went to see a rhinoceros at the Foire St. Germain, the famous annual fair in Paris. His recollection is undated, and available evidence now places the event within his first stay in Paris from June 1750 to August 1752. The following year, there were notices in a local newspaper on 12 and 14 February 1753 publicizing Clara’s visit to the Foire St. Germain. This is substantiated by the text of a broadsheet, undated, but giving her age as 15 years, indicating that it dates to 1753. A diary kept by the Dutch physician Wouter van Doeveren, includes an account of a visit to see the rhinoceros at the Foire on 24 February 1753.
During elephant culling programmes in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania between 1965 and 1969, data were routinely collected to elucidate population dynamics (including 12 body measurements, 23 organ weights and reproductive status). Inevitably, during dissections, other observations emerged but were not catalogued. Some of these are presented here as an eclectic assembly of pathological notes to extend knowledge of savannah elephant biology. These specimens were obtained during government-authorised elephant-culling operations undertaken in East Africa in the 1960s. The prevailing management view was that elephants were so radically changing woodlands in favour of grassland that parks were losing both vertebrate and invertebrate faunas dependent upon trees and woodland. Controlled population reduction was therefore undertaken as a conservation-management intervention intended to stop habitat change.
In African elephant (Loxodonta africana) societies, matriarchs hold the highest social rank, relying on long-term ecological knowledge to maintain group cohesion and coordinate collective movement. Although such leadership is widely recognized as behaviourally and cognitively demanding, we seldom quantify potential physiological costs. Here, we report higher faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGCM) concentrations in a matriarch compared to all other members of her family group in a semi-arid, fenced reserve in the Nama-Karoo biome of South Africa. From 2022–2024, we collected 372 faecal samples from all 18 individuals in the population and analyzed fGCM concentrations using a Bayesian framework. Demographic variables did not predict fGCM levels, but individual-level variation was noted. Posterior estimates indicated that the matriarch, Zinkwazi, exhibited higher fGCM concentrations than any other herd member. As no pregnancies occurred during the study period, elevated fGCM levels are unlikely to reflect reproductive state, suggesting instead that responsibilities of leadership may contribute to sustained glucocorticoid output. These findings highlight the possibility that matriarchal leadership carries measurable physiological costs. Understanding such costs may provide new insight into elephant social dynamics, welfare, and management in constrained or resource-limited landscapes.
