SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



25 



ANIMALS NOT YET IN THE ZOO. 



By Dr. Philip Lutley Sclater, F.R.S., 



Secretary to the Zoological Society of London. 



'THE arrivals in the Zoological Society's Gardens 

 are duly chronicled in The Field and other 

 journals every week, and any striking addition to 

 the list is sure to obtain the attention of the 

 illustrated newspapers. On the present occasion, 

 however, I propose to attract the notice of the 

 readers of Science-Gossip not to any novelty that 

 has been recently received by the Society, but to 

 certain animals which we have never yet been so 

 fortunate as to obtain, and which I think would 

 be of great interest both to naturalists and the 

 general public, if it were possible to bring them 

 alive to this country. 



These desirable acquisitions are all ungulates of 

 the great family Bovida?, the most useful of all 

 mammals to mankind. They are the musk-ox of 

 arctic America, the great Marco-Polo's sheep of 

 central Asia, the white goat of the Rocky Mountains, 

 and the tdkin of Assam. 



The musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) is really more 

 nearly allied to the sheep than to the oxen, and 

 would be more appropriately named the " musk 

 sheep," its large size having probably brought its 

 ordinary name upon it, which, however, it may be 

 remarked, is much less erroneous than many other 

 names of animals in 

 common use, as sheep 

 and oxen are by no 

 means distantly related. 

 Though nowaday s 

 restricted to arctic 

 America and Greenland, 

 the musk-ox was a 

 former inhabitant of the 

 old world also, and in 

 pleistocene ages ranged 

 over northern Europe, 

 descending into the 

 plains of Germany, • ■ 

 France and England. 

 Its remains generally 

 occur in river deposits, 

 along with those of the 

 reindeer, mammoth and 

 woolly rhinoceros. 



What, however, ren- 

 ders it more feasible to 



bring living musk-oxen to this country than was 

 formerly supposed to be the case, is the recent dis- 

 covery of the existence of this animal in Eastern 

 Greenland. The east coast of Greenland, although 

 beset by a perpetual blockade of ice along its more 

 southern shores, is accessible in its northern portion 

 with comparatively little difficulty. In 1889, Captain 

 Knudsen, of the Norwegian sealer, "Hekla," visited 

 Clavering Island on this coast, in 74° 10' N.L., and 

 found musk-oxen there in considerable numbers. 

 Again, in 1891, Lieutenant Ryder, of the Danish 

 East Greenland Expedition, landed in Scoresby's 

 Sound, in the same neighbourhood, and passed the 

 winter there with great success. In the adjoining 

 district of Jameson's land many musk-oxen were 

 met with, and animal and vegetable life were found 

 to be wonderfully rich, considering the high latitude. 

 The voyage to Eastern Greenland from England 

 is but short, and, as several observers have 

 told us that young musk-oxen are easily reared 

 and tamed, there would seem to be no insuperable 

 difficulty in getting living specimens from this 

 quarter. 



The musk-ox is of about the size of a small cow, 

 but with a large head and a formidable-looking 



MfSK-OX. 



