Scientists have created fake rhino horn using horse hair and hope it could be used to flood the market and drive down the price so that poaching would no longer be profitable.

Powdered rhino horn is a popular aphrodisiac in Chinese medicine and can command high prices, often because sellers mix it with erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra.

But now scientists at the University of Oxford and Fudan University, Shanghai, have shown it is possible to bundle horse hair together in a way that mimics the material.

The horn of the rhinoceros is not a horn like that of a cow, but a tuft of hair that grows tightly-packed and bound together by natural glue from sebaceous glands on the nose of the animal.

The new approach allowed researchers to fabricate samples that were confusingly similar to real rhino horn in look and feel.

Co-lead author, Professor Fritz Vollrath, from the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology, said: "It appears from our investigation that it is rather easy as well as cheap to make a bio-inspired hornlike material that mimics the rhino’s extravagantly expensive tuft of nose hair.

“We leave it to others to develop this technology further with the aim to confuse the trade, depress prices and thus support rhino conservation."