Historical population declines prompted significant genomic erosion in the northern and southern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum). White rhinoceros temporal genomics

Large vertebrates are extremely sensitive to anthropogenic pressure, and their populations are declining fast. The white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is a paradigmatic case: this African megaherbivore suffered a remarkable decline in the last 150 years due to human activities. Its subspecies, the northern (NWR) and the southern white rhinoceros (SWR), however, underwent opposite fates: the NWR vanished quickly, while the SWR recovered after the severe decline. Such demographic events are predicted to have an erosive effect at the genomic level, linked to the extirpation of diversity, and increased genetic drift and inbreeding. However, there is little empirical data available to directly reconstruct the subtleties of such processes in light of distinct demographic histories. Therefore, we generated a whole-genome, temporal dataset consisting of 52 re-sequenced white rhinoceros genomes, representing both subspecies at two time windows: before and during/after the bottleneck.Newly generated re-sequence whole-genome data includes: 30 genomes from museum specimens and 9 genomes from modern samples.