Size small. General colour pale rufous, broadly banded with black. Face, ears, neck, and shoulders rufous or chestnut, except the nasal region, which is blackish. Back from withers to rump pale rufous, conspicuously banded transversely with deep shining black. Under surface from chin to anus pale rufous, slightly paler than the ground-colour between the bands. Limbs rufous, but with broad black patches on the outer surfaces of the forearms and lower legs, and with the phalanges black all round. Heels with large glandular tufts of black hair on their postero-inferior surfaces. Tail rufous, more or less mixed with black above, white below.
Horns short, in the same line as the nasal profile, in the male barely two inches long, conical, tapering, sharply pointed, their greatest basal diameter going about 2½ times in their length; in the female less than one inch in an adult, smoother than in the male, but otherwise similar in character.
Skull stoutly built. Nasal region broad, flat, parallel-sided. Anteorbital fossæ very shallow. Frontal region not specially swollen. Horn-cores so pressed downwards and backwards as to cause marked depressions behind and below them on the parietals. Palate with its three posterior notches about level.
Dimensions:—♂. Height at withers 16 inches, ear 2·9, hind foot 6·8 (in a female, rather older, 7·3).
Skull: basal length 5·8 inches, greatest breadth 2·8, orbit to muzzle 3·4.
Hab. Interior of West Coast of Africa, from Liberia to Sierra Leone.
The flat skins of this Antelope, so remarkable for their transverse black bands, first attracted the attention of naturalists in 1832, when they were brought before the Committee of Science and Correspondence of the Zoological Society of London by Mr. E. T. Bennett, then Secretary of the Society. Mr. Bennett considered them as belonging “not improbably” to some species of Antelope, to which, however, he did not venture to give a name. They were supposed by Gould (then the Zoological Society’s taxidermist), who had obtained them, to have been received from Algoa Bay; but there is no doubt that this was an error, and that these flat skins, some of which are even now occasionally brought to this country, are from Sierra Leone and the adjoining districts of Western Africa.
For some years this subject appears to have slept, but was revived in 1836 by Mr. Ogilby, who, in the course of some remarks upon the preserved specimens of Antelopes in the Zoological Society’s Museum, took the opportunity of assuring his hearers that the skins described by Mr. Bennett belonged to a “real Antelope” and that he hoped shortly to “have an opportunity of describing it in detail under the name of Antelope doria.”
Some two years later the late Dr. Gray proposed the name “Antilope zebra” for the same animal, based upon a skin received by the British Museum from Sierra Leone. Gray recognized it as being evidently the same as that previously described by Bennett, and gave no reason for proposing to alter its name.
About the same time similar imperfect flat skins attracted the attention of M. Robert, of Paris, who shortly described them in a communication to the ‘Echo du Monde Savant’ of 1836 under the name Antilope zebrata. But there is no doubt, we think, that “doria” was the first published specific appellation of this Antelope, and ought to be adopted. “Doria” is stated by Gray (Cat. Ung. p. 129) to have been the Christian name of Mr. Ogilby’s wife.