270 



The Living Animals of the World 



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 Kay Lankester, I therefore proposed that it should be called 

 Helladoiherium 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. 



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 john- 

 stoni. The full dis- 

 covery obliged 

 Professor Ray Lan- 

 kester 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 palseontological discoveries 

 in Europe and in Asia that there existed a large family of ruminants which in their develop- 

 ment 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 remaii 

 to the present day. In the helladotherium and in the okapi these bony cores have dwindled 

 to mere bumps. 



Copyright photograph by Hutchinson & Co. 



HEAD OF OKAPI. 

 The enormous size of the ears is very noteworthy. 



