Size rather smaller than that of the Korrigum. General colour purplish red; the face, a line beneath the eye, another along the nape and back brown or black; front of the limbs and tip of the tail deep black.
Skull with a comparatively short nasal region, the nasal bones themselves unusually short and broad. Measurements (♀):—basal length 13·8 inches, greatest breadth 5·75, muzzle to eye 10·2.
Horns as in the Korrigum; those of a female 20·5 inches in length over the curve.
The colour-characters above given are taken from Heuglin’s description and figure, as no skin has been seen by us. A skull obtained by Consul Petherick on the Bahr-el-Ghazal has, however, furnished the cranial dimensions.
Hab. Sennaar, Kordofan, and Bahr-el-Ghazal.
The Tiang, as the well-known German traveller and naturalist Theodor von Heuglin proposed to call this Antelope, after its native name, is a representative form of the Korrigum in the upper valley of the Nile, and, so far as we are acquainted with it at present, agrees in all essential respects with its West-African ally, except in its slightly smaller bulk, and some differences in the black markings on the face and limbs. The Tiang, Topi, and Korrigum have been until lately generally regarded as conspecific; but in 1892 Herr Paul Matschie, of the Royal Natural History Museum of Berlin, came to the conclusion that previous authors had been in error in uniting the present animal and its allied forms of West and East Africa respectively under one head, and that they should be distinguished as different species. We follow Herr Matschie’s lead on this question, and have little doubt that his views will ultimately prove to be correct, although, from the great scarcity of specimens of all these Antelopes in European collections, it is not possible at present to arrive at a positive decision.
Fig. 8.
Skull of Damaliscus tiang, ♀.
The Stockholm Museum appears to have been the first to receive examples of this Antelope; but Sundevall referred them first of all to the Sassaby (Bubalis lunata), and, when he found that this was quite wrong, named them Bubalis koba, supposing them to be identical with the West-African Korrigum. Sundevall’s specimens were received from Sennaar, and are accurately described in his classical memoir on the “Pecora.”