SABLE ANTELOPE.
It is a practical impossibility to offer an enumeration of the living animals in this building which will permanently apply, and the best that can be attempted is an approximation. It is an inexorable law of Nature that the smallest animals shall have the shortest periods of life, and in a zoological park a small hoofed animal may be here to-day and gone to-morrow. In the following enumeration, mention will be made only of those species which are likely to remain longest on exhibition; and it may be observed that in this building there will be found various animals which are neither deer nor antelopes.
The Small Deer.
Osceola White-Tailed Deer, (Odocoileus virginianus osceola), is an interesting geographic race of the northern White-Tailed Deer which forms the parent stem of a group of six or seven subspecies. The robust and hardy northern type, often with large and strong antlers, gradually diminishes in size and in antlers, until in Mexico it becomes a small and delicate creature, with very small and light antlers bearing only two or three small tines. The next form has so widely diverged from the original type that it is necessary to accord it rank as a full species.
REDUNCA ANTELOPE.
The Sinaloa White-Tailed Deer, (Odocoileus sinaloae), is still smaller and weaker than the preceding. Our pair of specimens shown was obtained by Mr. and Mrs. C. William Beebe, in the State of Guadalajara, Mexico, and are highly interesting as a link near the lower terminus of the Odocoileus chain. On a majority of the antlers of this species there are no branches whatever, but simply a weak main beam, curving over at the tip, and terminating in a rounded point.
It should be noted here that the White-Tailed Deer group, (Odocoileus), is very well represented in South America by O. weigmanni of the Guianas.
The Marsh Deer, (Blastoceros paludosus), of eastern South America, is the largest South American deer. Our first specimen was obtained in 1904. Its antlers are strongly built but short, and in architecture resemble the antlers of a Siamese species known as Schomburgk Deer, (Cervus schomburgki); but the latter has on each beam three double bifurcations, while the former has but two. The Marsh Deer has very large, wide-spreading hoofs, which it would seem have been developed by many generations of existence on soft ground. It inhabits the jungles along river banks, in Brazil. The head of this animal is of remarkable length.
This important species is rather weak in captivity, and it is by no means certain that it can constantly be exhibited here. There is another South American species, (Blastoceros campestris), which is a zoological understudy, or miniature, of the large Marsh Deer.