00:04Najeem and her daughter Fatim, two northern white rhinos, the last of their kind.
00:12They were exterminated because of their horns.
00:18The two females are guarded 24-7 in a fenced-in sanctuary in Kenya.
00:25In the wild, there are only the southern white rhinos, which are related to them and from which they differ
00:31in language and genetics.
00:35The last bull of the northern species died in 2018.
00:41Since then, offspring have been ruled out.
00:45If Najeem and Fatu die, an entire species will become extinct.
00:50And there is nothing we can do.
00:53Or is there?
00:54Yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:56Experts in Berlin are not yet admitting defeat.
01:01The taxpayer-funded Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research leads the international scientific consortium BioRescue.
01:10Since 2019, reproductive medicine specialist Thomas Hildebrandt has been the head of this project,
01:17which aims to prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino.
01:22When you work with such a large mammal to save it, you are faced with almost unsolvable problems and have
01:29to develop completely new approaches.
01:35The cryolaboratory.
01:37For decades, researchers have been storing tissue samples, egg and sperm cells from 300 endangered animal species here.
01:45Like in a frozen zoo.
01:48At minus 193 degrees and liquid nitrogen, the cells are preserved in a kind of hibernation and thawed as required.
01:57These include sperm from four northern white rhino bulls that died in zoos.
02:04These samples are crucial for Thomas Hildebrandt and Susanne Holze.
02:19The Csector's
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