THE OKAPI OF THE CONGO FOREST.
Previous to the discovery of this ruminant the giraffe stood alone among the mammals of the world. It has now at least one living relative.
This promise was eventually redeemed by Mr. Karl Eriksson, a Swedish officer in the Belgian service. Mr. Eriksson sent me a complete skin and two skulls. The skin and the bigger of the two skulls belonged to a young male. This is the skin which is now set up in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and of which a photographic illustration accompanies this notice. Upon receiving this skin, I saw at once what the okapi was—namely, a close relation of the giraffe. From the very small development of the horn-bosses, I believed that it was nearer allied to the helladotherium than to the living giraffe. In forwarding the specimens to Professor Ray Lankester, I therefore proposed that it should be called Helladotherium tigrinum. Professor Ray Lankester, having examined the specimens with a greater knowledge than I possessed, decided that the animal was rather more closely allied to the giraffe than to the helladotherium, but that it possessed sufficient peculiarities of its own to oblige him to create for its reception a new genus, which he proposed to call Ocapia.
Copyright photograph by Hutchinson & Co.
HEAD OF OKAPI.
The enormous size of the ears is very noteworthy.
Meantime, the original strips of the skin (which apparently belonged to an older and larger animal than the specimen mounted at South Kensington) had been pronounced by experts to whom they were submitted to be the skin of an undiscovered species of horse, and this supposed new horse had been tentatively named by Dr. P. L. Sclater Equus johnstoni. The full discovery obliged Professor Ray Lankester to set aside any idea of the okapi being allied to the horse, but he was good enough to attach Mr. Sclater's specific name of johnstoni to his newly founded genus of Ocapia.
Up to the time of writing this is all that is known of this extraordinary survival in the Congo Forest of the only living relation of the giraffe. We know by palæontological discoveries in Europe and in Asia that there existed a large family of ruminants which in their development and features were neither of the Ox group nor of the Deer, but in some respects occupied a position midway between these two branches of cloven-hoofed, horned, ruminating Ungulates. To this family the Giraffe, the Okapi, the Helladotherium, the Samotherium, the Sivatherium, and the Bramatherium belong. In all probability bony projections arose from the skulls of these creatures similar in some measure to the prominent bony cores of the horns of oxen. From the top, however, of these bony cores there would seem to have arisen anciently antlers, possibly deciduous like those of the prongbuck. In time creatures like the giraffe lost any need for such weapons of offence, and ceased to grow antlers; but the bony cores from which these antlers once proceeded still remained, and in the case of the giraffe remain to the present day. In the helladotherium and in the okapi these bony cores have dwindled to mere bumps.