The Study On Rhinoceros Horn And Its Imitation

Nowadays, much research on the protection and disease of rhinos has been done at home and abroad. Since that rhinos have been endangered, and international animal protection organization also bans rhino horn trading, it is very limited to do the research on the composition and identification of the rhino horn world widely. And due to that there has been a long history of using rhino horn as a drug since ancient times in China, domestic research focuses on the composition and curative effect, the limited observation on external characteristics and destructive component testing. In addition, as organic gemstone, rhino horn can also be used as decoration. In recent years, the trade of rhino horns in auction shop has increased sharply because that there are plenty of remaining handicrafts mated of rhino horn in Ming and Qing dynasties. But there has been no report and research on this.According to the situation that there are no standards in the quality check process of rhino horn handicrafts and decorations, in order to provide technical support to the quality check departments, this paper researches on the identification of the rhinoceros horn and its imitation, with the aim to search for a non-destructive method to identification of rhinoceros horns by routine inspection and infrared spectroscopy.By observing the external characteristics of different horns, there are many similar aspects between rhino horn and its alternatives, including color, transmissivity, smell and texture, etc. Therefore, it is difficult to distinguish rhino horn and its alternatives through observing their external characteristics.The research on the amino acids content of rhinoceros horn and its imitation has been done by the high performance liquid chromatography method. The results show that various amino acids contents of rhino horn are in a relative lower level, and the amount of amino acids is also the lowest. However, the rate of essential amino acids to total amino acids in rhino horn is high. Overall, Rhino horn and its alternatives all have 17 kinds of amino acids and they almost have the same contents of different kinds of amino acids. Thus, it is necessary to further search for a feasible method to identify the differences of components of rhino horn and its alternatives. And then the infrared spectral analysis was employed to study the differences of components of rhino horn and its alternatives. The results show that the rhinoceros horn has two absorption peaks of P-H stretching vibration of sphingolipid at 2350cm-1, while other horns only have one or no absorption peak in this region. What's more, compared with other horns, it has weak absorption peaks of C=O stretching vibration of hexosamine at 1733 cm-1, and absorption peaks of S-O stretching vibration of taurine at 881 cm-1. However, other horns have none of these absorption peaks.Comparing infrared absorption spectrums of different horns and those of powder pellets, it can be found that infrared absorption spectrums of powder pellets have a great degree of loss, and their absorption intensity is generally stronger. And it is unstable to test powder pellets by the infrared spectral analysis. Whereas, the intensity of IR absorption spectrums of skin products are generally lower, and the peak near 1650cm-1 are weakened, the subsequent peaks are relatively enhanced.