Scientists racing to pull the northern white rhino back from the brink of extinction have produced two more embryos from exiles harvested in Kenya, increasing their total number of viable embryos to find it's meant a happy end to what was a difficult 2020 when international travel restrictions forced scientists to delay some key procedures on could have jeopardized the pioneering conservation project.

2020 was really a hard, harsh movement for all of us.

Thomas Hildebrandt is head off for production management at Germany's Lip Needs Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, which is leading the buyer Rescue International Project.

So we had these obstacles.

We had all these problems, but at the end we managed to go back to Kenya and beat successful.

So Christmas Eve give us a presence, two embryos and we are extremely happy about that.

The northern white rhino is critically endangered.

The last male died in Kenya's or Pejeta Conservancy in 2018.

On the last two surviving animals are mother and daughter Nah, Jin and Fattouh, who are both infertile in December by a rescue harvested exiles which were fertilized with frozen sperm from dead males.

The embryos will be transferred into a surrogate mother, for which by a rescue plans to use the southern white rhino, a subspecies numbering about 18,000.

We are quite under time constraints because we want really a transfer off the social knowledge from the last two existing Northern with rhinos toe a cop.

The team hopes to deliver their first northern white rhino cough in three years and a wider population in the next two decades.