646 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



"It has at the present time practically disappeared from the 

 northern border of the Sahara, and has entirely disappeared from 

 the Aures and South Tunis .... The species still exists in the 

 south of Oran, in the large hollows which open into Chott Tigri from 

 the south of Geryville." (Gruvel, 1937, p. 63.) 



Powell-Cotton (1937, pp. 65-66) gives the following account of two 

 quests in Morocco: 



[In 1930] Caid Krit, a great hunter, whom we met at Outat [on the Muluya, 

 at the southeastern base of the Middle Atlas], told us he had shot many in 

 the past, but the last herd that he had found, in the plain some 70 kilometres 

 south-east of Outat, numbered fifteen, and of these he had shot five males 

 . . . and seven females . . . ; this was in the autumn of 1917, since when 

 he had neither seen nor heard of the beast. . . . According to him fifteen 

 was an exceptionally large herd; three or four the usual number and occa- 

 sionally he had come across a solitary male. 



A doctor quartered at Outat showed us a couple of horns the right of a 

 male and the left of a female both of which had been shot by the Caid. 



[In 1936, in extreme southwestern Morocco,] Caid Aied at Talaint . . . 

 eagerly recognized the photo of the Bubal, and said that some twenty years 

 previously he had a living pair of them sent him from the south .... 



At Talsint, some 90 kilometres south of Outat, the Caids of three different 

 districts assured us they had never heard of the beast. . . . 



At Outat itself we found a tribesman of Caid Krit who confirmed that 

 some twenty odd years before, herds of Bubal, up to twenty animals, existed 

 in that region among the foothills, but all had now disappeared, and no one 

 knew whither. 



Thus ended a journey of some 2,700 kilometres by motor and mule, and the 

 question still remains whether any Bubal exist further south among the rough 

 country on the northern frontier of the Sahara. 



Pease (1937, p. 80) contributes the following information: In 

 Algeria, in years gone by, "I . . . talked to many Frenchmen and 

 Arabs who had known the Bubal to be very numerous in Algeria 

 and Tunisia, and to one or two French colonels who had shot them in 

 the great battles of game, which massacres were organized in the 

 early days of the French occupation. ... I ... collected evi- 

 dence that they were still to be found in the Hammada, south of 

 Geryville, and towards the Moroccan frontier as late as 1895-6." 



In 1905 the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia received 

 an adult female from the Zoological Society of Philadelphia. The 

 mounted skin and the skeleton represent perhaps the only specimen 

 in America. The mount stands 38^ inches at the shoulder. 



Libya and Egypt. Outside of Barbary the Bubal is found in 

 North Africa as far as Egypt (Lataste, 1885, p. 293) . 



"From the Algeria Sahara the Bubal extends no doubt into . . . 

 Tripoli .... In Egypt . . . the Bubal appears to be now quite 

 extinct." (Sclater and Thomas, 1894, vol. 1, p. 10.) 



