The Sumatran rhinoceros has become extinct in Malaysia after the last of the species in the country died of cancer.
The Wildlife Department in eastern Sabah state on Borneo said the rhino, named Iman, suffered with a number of uterine tumours since her capture in March 2014.
Department director Augustine Tuuga said the 25-year-old was in ‘significant pain’ from growing pressure of the lumps to her bladder, but that her death came sooner than expected.
It follows that of the country’s only male rhino six months ago in Sabah.
Another female also died in captivity there in 2017.
Efforts to breed them have been futile but Sabah authorities have harvested their cells for possible reproduction.
The state environment minister Christina Liew said: ‘Despite us knowing that this would happen sooner rather than later, we are so very saddened by this news.’
She said Iman had escaped death several times over the past few years due to sudden massive blood loss.
But wildlife officials managed to nurse her back to health and obtained her egg cells for a possible collaboration with Indonesia to reproduce the critically endangered species through artificial insemination, she added.
The Sumatran rhino is the smallest of the rhinoceros species and the only one with two horns.
They once roamed across Asia as far as India, but its numbers have shrunk drastically due to deforestation and poaching.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates there are only about 80 left, mostly living in the wild in Sumatra and Borneo.
