The Old Petyta Conservancy is over 200,000 acres of grassland that lies in the center of Kenya.

Just to give you an idea of how massive 200,000 acres is, that's a little bit bigger than New York City.

There aren't many buildings. It's mostly grass and sky as far as the eye can see.

And in the eastern part of Old Petya, there's a small memorial.

It was established in September of 2014 to represent a crisis.

The memorial is made up of 16 black gravestones, all surrounding in Acacia tree. Each of those gravestones have a name carved at the very top, Sudan, Ishrini, Sunni, and others.

Each gravestone also has a sentence or two on how its owner passed.

The gravestone of Zulu reads,

shot on the 10th of July at night, died a month

later after unsuccessful treatment. But these names aren't the names of humans. They're all rhinos.

Most have fallen victim to poachers, but even those that died naturally represent the threat

that their species is facing. The memorial side was set up in around 2004.

It was at the time when the plight of rhinos were treated was really quite evident.

There was a lot of killing of rhinos, not only on a pedigata, but across Africa.

My name is Baudelaire, and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we go to Nanyuki, Kenya, to the Old Pagita Conservancy,

to hear the story of a species on the brink.

More after this. The Old Petyta Conservancy exists because of the plight of the rhinos. Almost 20 years after its founding, they've taken on additional efforts to save the other members of what's called the Big Five,

lions, elephants, buffalo, and leopards.

But the focus of the conservancy still remains on the subject of the memorial, the most endangered member of the group, the rhinos.

It's like when we have a plate for the memorial sites for fallen soldiers

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