THE OKAPI

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 254, 24 September 1935, Page 2

THE OKAPI

ROYAL GIFT TO THE ZOO. THE “LIVING FOSSIL.” The scientific correspondent of the London Times writes:— At last, we hope, the people of this country will have the opportunity _ of seeing a living okapi. H.M. the King of the Belgians has given one of these extraordinary animals to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and the Prince is generously presenting it to the Zoological Society for exhibition in Regent’s Park. Believers in the existence of the seaserpent point to the okapi in support of their claim that monsters unknown to science can exist even in our modern age. An adult okapi is as big as a large donkey, is strikingly coloured and strangely shaped; the area of its distribution extends over a region nearly as large as Great Britain. It would seem impossible that such an animal should remain undiscovered until the dawn of the twentieth cent my. Yet that was the case. In 1900 Sir Harry Johnston, that versatile man. was Special Commissioner in Uganda. His interest had been aroused by a passage in Stanley’s “Darkest Africa,” where the Congo pygmies told the great explorer of the existence of a “forest donkey” which ate leaves. CLOVEN HOOFS.

Johnston himself heard further reports of the animal from the pygmies, and during 1900 secured two strips of okapi skin made up as bandoleers. These strips of skin were sent to London and exhibited at a meeting of the Zoological Society. They clearly belonged to an animal new to science; but no one guessed at the true relationships of their possessor, and on the strength of the pygmies’ description of the creature as a forest donkey, they were assigned to a new representative of the horse genus—Equus johnstoni—and supposed to belong to a forest zebra.

However, Sir Harry Johnston very soon learned that the animal had cloven hoofs, so that the new species of horse could have no existence. But there remained the possibility that it was a forest species of eland, and it was only when Johnston, early in 1901, received a complete skin and two skulls of the animal that its extraordinary nature became apparent. Johnston’s knowledge of zoology enabled him to assert at once that the okapi was an animal of strikingly new type, related to the giraffes; and this view was completely justified by Sir Ray Laukester’s detailed examination of the skin and skulls when they reached England. Concerning the history of the discovery of the okapi, it only remains to add that before 1900 earlier travellers had seen and described portions of okapi skin, and that white officers in the Congo had often eaten its flesh; but it was Johnston who first realised that the animal was of. new and unde scribed type, and to him belongs the I credit, of. its discovery, both in the scientific and the popular sense of the word: SCIENTIFIC INTEREST.

Its scientific interest is indeed very great, for it can truthfully be described as a living fossil. It is scarcely distinguishable from an extinct animal called samotherium (or alternatively paleotragus), which existed in Greece in the Lower Pliocene period, some 10,000,000 or 15,000,000 years ago. The okapi, taking refuge in the inhospitable tropical forests of Africa, is the only survivor of the giraffe stock in its short-necked and more flourishing period. Externally the okapi looks more like a deer or an antelope than a giraffe. But that is because we are accustomed to think of an elongated neck as the chief giraffe characteristic, whereas it is an unusual specialisation in the group. The okapi to-day is found in a narrow belt of country 80 to 140 miles wide, stretching westwards from close to the base of Ruwenzori almost to the lower reaches of the great Übangi River as it makes its way into the Congo. It seems at first sight surprising that it should not range all through the great equatorial forests of Africa; but it appears that extensive swamps are a bar to its spread, so that it is confined to the undulating and slightly drier north-easterly portion of the forest area.

The annals of the okapi in captivity are short and simple. None was ever brought to Europe until after the War, in 1919. Since that time, throe have been exhibited in Antwerp Zoo, one of which still survives. The present specimen will be the fourth to reach Europe and the first to be exhibited in any country save Belgium.

A picture of the okapi appeared, recently in the illustrations page of the “Standard.”