Cephalophus ruficrista, Bocage, P. Z. S. 1878, p. 744.
Vernacular Names:—Bush-Goat of English at Sierra Leone (Afzelius); Mbimbi in Longobondo (Pechuel-Loesche, fide Matschie).
Size large; form stout and heavy. Ears short, broad, and rounded, their length much less than the distance from eye to muzzle. Fur very short on the fore-quarters, longer on the hind back, but in adults worn off and showing the whitish underfur or naked skin round the base of the tail. General colour all over, of face, body above and below, and of limbs, dark blackish brown. Crest orange or rufous, little developed in youth, and again wearing off in old age. Muzzle, cheeks and chin, and extreme tips of ear whitish. Lumbar region with a broad pale yellowish mesial stripe running from the middle of the back on to the loins.
In extreme youth the hairs of the posterior half of the body are all tipped with white, except just along what becomes afterwards the pale lumbar stripe, where they have long blackish tips, entirely hiding the white; and the caudal region, afterwards whitish and partly naked, is clothed with long black hairs.
Skull, in proportion to the size of the animal, delicate, slender, and elongate. Muzzle slender, tapering, not laterally swollen between the premolars and the anteorbital fossa. Anteorbital fossæ of medium depth. Mesial notch of palate surpassing anteriorly the lateral ones by about half an inch, these latter comparatively deep and V-shaped.
Horns long and tapering, lying back in or below the line of the nasal profile, rather bowed downwards terminally. Divergent, slender, evenly tapering, but little roughened at base; those of male and female almost precisely alike, except that the latter are slightly smaller. Length (♂) 6·4 inches; basal diameter going about 5 or 5½ times in the length.
Dimensions:—♀. Height at shoulder 34 inches, ear 4, hind foot 13·5.
Skull (♂): basal length 10·3 inches, greatest breadth 4·9, muzzle to orbit 6·5.
Hab. West Coast of Africa, from Liberia to Angola.
We commence our history of this numerous group of Antelopes, for which we adopt the term “Duiker” (i.e. “Diver”), originally given by the Boers of the Cape to C. grimmi, as a vernacular name, with two species readily distinguishable from the remainder by their greater size, but not apparently otherwise divergent in structure. These are the Yellow-backed Duiker and Jentink’s Duiker.