Rather larger than C. d. typicus, and ears apparently rather longer. Colour deep chestnut all over, the dorsal line deep black, the metacarpals and metatarsals brown. Superciliary stripe chestnut, indistinct, far less bright than in C. d. typicus, and the general colour of the head darker and duller.
Skull with the muzzle of the ordinary slender elongate shape, the distance from the anterior edge of the orbit to the muzzle exceeding the zygomatic breadth. Teeth decidedly larger than in the typical form.
Dimensions of the type, an immature female:—Height at withers 19 inches, ear 2·4, hind foot 8.
Skull: basal length (c.) 6 inches, greatest breadth 3·3, orbit to muzzle 3·5.
This subspecies is based on a female specimen referred by Gray[13] to “Cephalophus badius”; its skull has been figured by him under that name. Thomas has, however, shown that the skull of this specimen differs so much from that of typical C. dorsalis that, in spite of its external resemblance, it should be looked upon as representing a distinct subspecies; and this view we have accepted in the present work. Additional specimens will, however, be needed before its position can be satisfactorily determined. For the present, therefore, we publish all that is known about it, and trust that further specimens from different localities will clear up the precise relationship it bears to the true C. dorsalis, and also to its close ally C. leucogaster.
Hab. Cameroons.
The Bay Duiker, as this Antelope has long been called, is better known than the species which we have last spoken of and appears to have a wider distribution. At the same time it varies a good deal in the colour of its fur, both according to age and in the various localities in which it is found. Gray, who was an habitual species-maker, has, as was pointed out by Sclater in 1869, described it under three different names, based on age-changes and on slight variations in colour.
Commencing in 1846, Gray established his Cephalophus dorsalis on a specimen in the British Museum, which had been brought to this country alive by Mr. Whitfield from Sierra Leone and had died in the Surrey Zoological Gardens. In 1850 he figured the same species in the ‘Knowsley Menagerie’ from a drawing made by Waterhouse Hawkins. This drawing was probably taken from living specimens in the Knowsley Collection, also procured by Whitfield, who was a collector employed by Lord Derby. In 1852 Dr. Gray seems to have come to the conclusion that the animal figured in the ‘Knowsley Menagerie’ was not the same as the true Cephalophus dorsalis originally described from Mr. Whitfield’s specimen, and, accordingly, in his list of Ungulata Furcipeda in the British Museum, named the former Cephalophus badius, retaining the name Cephalophus dorsalis for the latter. Dr. Gray, however, did not state exactly how the two species are to be distinguished, and he afterwards united them under one heading. The typical specimen of C. breviceps was described when alive in the Zoological Gardens, and, as noticed by Gray himself, “assumed all the appearance, as it grew up, of C. badius”
As recorded by Temminck in his ‘Esquisses Zoologiques sur la Côte de Guinée,’ the well-known Dutch collector Pel met with this Antelope in Ashantee and Sierra Leone, where he states that it is found, although somewhat rarely, in the littoral forests, showing itself only at night. Two other collectors from Holland, Büttikofer and Stampfli, obtained specimens of this species on the Junk River in Liberia, which were likewise transmitted to the Leyden Museum.
Examples of this species in the British Museum were procured in Fantee by the native collector Aubinn; and we may therefore state confidently that the typical form of C. dorsalis inhabits the whole coast-region of Western Africa from Liberia to the mouth of the Niger.