THE ORIBIS 
GENUS OUREBIA 
T HOUGH standing little more than two feet in height at the 
shoulder, the oribis are yet the largest of all the neotragine 
family of antelopes, of which they form one of the sub -genera. 
Their special characteristics are the existence of bare glandular 
spots beneath each ear, as in the reedbucks, tufts of hair on the 
knees and at the apertures of the large inguinal glands, and the 
large size of the suborbital fossce in the skull, which are required for the 
reception of the face glands. The males alone carry horns, which grow, as 
a rule, parallel to one another, though sometimes with an outward spread. 
They grow straight up from the top of the head, or nearly straight, as 
they usually have a very slight forward curvature. They are ringed more or 
less strongly for two or three inches from the base, and measure from four 
to seven inches in length. 
Oribis are usually of a light yellow fawn colour on the back, neck, face 
and sides, with the underparts white, but some are quite dark brown, 
and I found the colour variation amongst individual oribis liviqg in the 
same district of the Bahr-el-Ghazal province of the Sudan very great. 
There is a black patch on the forehead of all oribis, male or female 
(in the former it lies between the horns), and wherever I met with these 
antelopes in South and South-Central or South-East Africa, the terminal 
two -thirds of their moderately long tails were always absolutely black. 
But in all the oribis I saw in East Africa — near Landiani and on the Gwas 
N’gishu plateau — the tails were not black, but fawn-coloured; whilst in 
the Bahr-el-Ghazal the colour of these appendages varied from fawn to 
blackish brown, but was never absolutely black as in the South African 
animals. 
There is one curious point about oribis, in whatever part of Africa they 
may be found, and that is that the females are larger and heavier than 
the males. This is also the case with all species of dik-diks, but with all 
other African antelopes the male is, without exception, a larger and 
heavier animal than the female.* When shooting for meat, and a pair of 
oribis or dik-diks are seen at such a distance that the horns of the male 
*In the case of the Okapi — which stands in a genus by itself— the female is a larger and heavier animal than the 
male. 
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