Alcelaphus cookei, Lyd. Field, lxxvii. p. 858, fig. (horns) (1891).
Bubalis cokei, Ward, Horn Meas. p. 61, fig. (head) (1892); Lyd. Horns and Hoofs, p. 197, fig. 38 (horns) (1893); Jackson, Big Game Shooting, i. pp. 285, 291.
Vernacular Name:—Kongoni in Swahili (Lugard).
Size small, height at withers about 45 inches. General colour bright fawn all over, without dark markings, except that the lower lip is rather browner than the rest. Lower part of rump paler than the back, but not sharply defined. Tail long, its hairs reaching to the middle of the lower leg; black-crested for about its terminal three fourths. Face-hairs as in B. swaynei and B. tora. Glandular suborbital brushes short and not conspicuous.
Skull of medium proportions. Measurements:—basal length 14 inches, greatest breadth 5·2, muzzle to orbit 10·7, facial length 14·7, breadth of forehead 3·5.
Horns short and thick, bracket-shaped, the middle portions of the two sides in exactly the same straight line; their tips as long as their middle portions.
Hab. Eastern Africa, from Usagara northwards to Kilimanjaro and Masailand.
The first recorded specimen of Coke’s Hartebeest was a frontlet obtained by the German traveller Von der Decken in 1862 at Lake Jipe in Masailand. These horns were referred by Peters, in his account of the mammals of Von der Decken’s expedition, to B. caama of the Cape. But Sir Victor Brooke, who subsequently examined them at Berlin, as we know from his MSS., was convinced of their distinctness from the species of the Cape Colony, and had determined to call the new species after Von der Decken, although he never published the name. The subjoined figures (4 a and 4 b) were prepared under Sir Victor Brooke’s direction, and show a front view and a three-quarter view of these horns.
Fig. 4 a.